Bluehost switching to PHP 5-problems occuring

I know of WP-DB-Backup working on dozens of blogs using PHP 5, so I suspect this is a separate issue.

If anyone finds any reproducible bugs with WP-DB-Backup, please bring them up where I am most likely to see them: in the WP-DB-Backup support forum.

I just got off the phone with the Bluehost folks. They indicated they are not – in the foreseeable future (next 6-12 months) doing away with PHP4. They are enabling the customer the ability to toggle – from the admin panel – between PHP4 and PHP5 prior to making a commitment. As well, if the results are not those expected, the customer has the ability to roll back to PHP4.

I personally prefer PHP4 as I don’t believe PHP5 is stable enough yet for widespread adoption.

jmo.

dkaye315, what are you talking about? PHP5 has been stable for years!

I left my former host because they couldn’t work out post-upgrade PHP5 issues on the backside. While the apps coded in 5 may be fine, the mainframe architecture seems to experience some major hiccups.

I can absolutely confirm many users have experienced issues after the hosts upgraded their PHP5. What I cannot confirm is the version and whether there was any associated similarities.

With that as a reference point, I will happily swim in the PHP4 instead.

from php.net

Post titled PHP End Of Life Announcement
Date posted July 13, 2007

PHP 6 is on the way, PHP 4 will be discontinued. The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.

My own experience is that some hosts are reluctant to make the investment (man hours, education, etc.) necessary to adopt configurations to work well with newer versions of any open source software. This is not as true for enterprise software because the customer base expects to pay for things.

There are lots of hosts, for example, offering free install and support only for really old versions of WordPress.

^ wow! talk about raining on my parade! ?? (jk) i say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it – but seems like not i’m gonna have a choice pretty soon. arghh.

You’re way ahead of me dkaye :), which isn’t saying much by itself but I haven’t seen too many WP bloggers getting Share This to validate and customizing plugins to include links to authors.
It’s easy for me to point to PHP 6 or CakePHP when I haven’t spent hours or years of my life learning earlier versions, but the past 20 years of using other software has given me a solid appreciation for the benefits of staying relatively near the leading edge of the curve.

dkaye315,

When I initially talked to Bluehost support they informed me that with every server they switched to PHP 5 they were eliminating PHP 4 from that server.

About the time you called Bluehost they had changed their tune because I called them again around the same time as you did and they said the same thing about the PHP switch.

By the way, the version of PHP that BH is switching to is 5.2.4 which is solid and stable and for anyone who uses Windows Live Writer which wouldn’t publish to anything other than PHP 5.1.6, PHP 5.2.4 is now compatible. I tested WLW out by publishing to a Bluehost WordPress powered blog that was running on PHP 5.2.4 and also to my WordPress Sandbox (XAMPP for Windows w/PHP 5.2.4). No sweat.

I think I have my site (hosted by BH) switched over to PHP5, but maybe not. It overwrites the .htaccess file and my site wouldn’t come up. So I editted it back to:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

Then it worked. Still testing out the plug-ins though.