The Suburban Chicago PHP & Web Development Meetup

Andrew Nacin from WordPress provided these interesting statistics on what PHP versions are serving up WordPress sites around the world:

4.3 – 1.3%
4.4 – 6.3%
5.0 – 0.1%
5.1 – 3.5%
5.2 – 85.4%
5.3 – 3.4%

The fine folks at Think Vitamin/Carsonified posted an introduction to object oriented programming that I though some of you might enjoy.

Remember PHP 6? If you’ve been following PHP development, it’s been hard to miss the next big iteration looming over our heads. Some of the exciting new features of PHP 5.3 were back-ported from PHP 6, making it an impressive “minor version” upgrade. I always found PHP 6 interesting for two reasons. First, safe_mode (more appropriately called kill-your-server-with-tons-of-security-checks_mode) was being removed completely. Second, PHP was being rewritten with Unicode support throughout.

Unfortunately, Unicode support was turning out to be a pain, and development “stalled”. Yesterday, Rasmus Lerdorf announced a do-over for PHP 6 using new approaches to implementing Unicode. In addition, PHP 6 will be developed alongside PHP 5.4, so it’ll be less of a hassle to share features between them.

Though this may sound like a step backward, I see it as a big step towards a working PHP 6 release and an opportunity to make PHP 5.4 more of a stepping stone on the way to the next major version.