Zen Cart Announces Plans to Move to PHP 5

Reprinted from: The Zen Forum Posted by: DrByte

Zen Cart moves to PHP 5

Zen Cart continues to be developed with a view to staying current with where technology and customer behaviours/trends are going. In considering the big-picture of ensuring that the Zen Cart code base is not only contemporary but also compliant with current and evolving standards, Zen Cart will be adopting PHP 5.2 as its minimum requirement effective with the v1.4.0 release, or on Feb 5, 2008, whichever comes first.

Background:

1. PHP has announced that PHP 4 will no longer be supported as of the end of year 2007. Ref: http://www.php.net/index.php#2007-07-13-1

2. PHP 5 has been deployed and tested in production environments for three years, and many hosting companies have already adopted it in some way.

3. Several of the leading PHP projects and web hosting providers are working together to push for PHP 5 adoption at GoPHP5.org. Zen Cart is pleased to announce our participation in this movement.

Additional Clarifications
Zen Cart v1.3.8 is currently in development and will continue to support a minimum version of PHP 4.3.2, and security fixes will continue to be applied to Zen Cart v1.3.8 for at least six months after our first release requiring PHP 5.2 (ie: Zen Cart v1.4.0).

If you want to use the cool new features that will be available in future releases (v1.4 and higher), you should make sure that your web host supports PHP 5.2 and encourage them to upgrade if they don't! We feel that requiring PHP 5 is important for Zen Cart and its future development.

PHP 5.2 has been chosen instead of earlier versions of PHP 5 because PHP 5.2 has shown to perform better and be significantly more stable than earlier versions

We will be working with our certified web hosts to make sure that they meet the requirements by the target date.

WHAT THIS MEANS
Zen Cart v1.4.0 and higher will be incompatible with PHP 4.x. The minimum supported PHP version will be PHP 5.2.

Zen Cart v1.3.x will continue to have updates and will remain PHP 4.3-compatible. NOTE: After v1.4.0 is released, updates to the v1.3.x series will consist of patches for serious security issues only, in conjunction with the posted support life cycle.

Zen Cart v1.2.x and earlier are no longer officially supported. They are PHP 4.3-compatible and probably operate on PHP 5 fine; however, it's important to note that they will not work on MySQL5 (typically installed alongside PHP 5) without extensive code modifications.

To view official announcement, click here...