Announcements

PHP4 - PHP5 Migration Information

07/12/2007 00:00

As you may already know, we currently provide PHP4 and PHP5 alongside each other. We will continue to provide PHP4 until January 2008 (with a posibility to extend until August 2008), so that all our clients can make the conversion to PHP5. After that our default PHP will be PHP5 on all servers.

Please test all your applications on PHP5 ASAP. Most applications are likely to already work with PHP5, but following the migration guide will help in making these changes run smoothly.

How can you test your applications in PHP5?

1. You can activate and use PHP5 alongside PHP4 to test your applications using the following instructions....

By default PHP5 is accessible using .php5 as the file extension for PHP files. Just name the PHP script something.php5 and it will be processed by PHP5.

To use PHP5 for all *.php files as default in your entire account, you need to edit ~/public_html/.htaccess file and add this directive:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5 .php .php4 .php3 .phtml

This will make the server process all files named .php or .php4 or .php3 or .phtml (and .php5 is already handled) by PHP5.

After this change, no files under public_html will be processed by the old PHP4, but if you do need to revert back you can just undo the changes.

If you want to use both PHP4 and PHP5, you can create a subfolder in public_html say "testphp5" and add the above mentioned directive in .htaccess there. This way PHP5 will be used only under that "testphp5" folder and the folder tree under it, the rest of your account will continue to use PHP4.

or

2. You can setup your own test environment using XAMPP on your home/office PC.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

1) You have 3 weeks from today (06-12-2007) to make the switch to PHP5. Once again, please note that your application may already work in PHP5 or may just need little tweaks here and there to migrate. By not taking action before 1-1-2008 could result in a broken website.

2) If you are not sure and did not develop the application, please check with the developer(s) of the application or hire a php developer to test and make any fixes.

3) We will disable PHP4 on 01-01-2008 unless you have requested an extention, this extention can be up until 01-08-2008, after this date PHP4 will be removed completely from our servers. If the PHP developers decide to stop creating security patches at an earlier date this date shall change.

We recommend you make the change before 01-01-2008 and update our support staff when you are over on PHP5.

If you have questions about your migration to PHP5 please contact us.

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