PostNuke and PHP 5
In an earlier blog post I wrote about how I think companies, and open source projects, will loose business if they don’t start the upgrade path to PHP 5. With PHP 6 in the works it is only a matter of time before most people will consider PHP 4 applications legacy. Now that there is a clear message that no new versions of PHP 4 will be released after December 31st, 2007 this will go much faster.
In the long run I think that it is not enough to just be PHP 5 friendly while staying backwards compatible.
There is so much added benefit in using PHP 5 and probably PHP 6 later on that projects not taking advantage of new features will eventually be left behind. New developers will more often than not start with PHP 5 when learning the language. I think many open source projects will have difficulties in attracting new developers if they don’t actively promote using new features in the language. Some projects will most likely fork. A fork is not always a good solution with all the problems and politics that usually comes with it. It would be stupid not to prepare for new PHP versions in advance and avoid all the problems.
The other day I had a conversation with an industry collegue from back home working on a poker site using the PostNuke CMS. He is not very technical but still has many itches to scratch. Most of the issues he aired was mostly due to a lack of specific functionality he needed though. He was forced to create many pages, for example a listing of poker sites, manually. This he admitted might just be due to the fact that PostNuke is the wrong system for what he is doing. We had a very interesting discussion regarding PHP CMS applications and functionality.
But after our discussion and after reading “The state of the PHP5 CMS…” by Lukas Smith I thought it would be interesting to have a closer look at PostNuke, being a well known and widely used PHP application. If I searched google for “drop support for php 4″ I get about 11 million hits. I guess a lot of the hits aren’t really relevant but still. If I add the word “PostNuke” to the search I can’t find one relevant hit in the search result. So what is a project as PostNuke doing, if anything, with PHP 5?
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