At the beginning of the month I was interviewed by Sean Kerner of InternetNews.com about the GoPHP5.org initiative, and what it means for the state of PHP 5 adoption. The article is entitled "PHP 4 is Dead—Long Live PHP 5" which is a nice tip of the hat to Dries' earlier article PHP IS DEAD ... LONG LIVE PHP!.
The decision to move to PHP 5.2 as the minimum required version for Drupal 7 has already started to influence people's thinking about how Drupal is developed. For example, one of the proposals that came from the recent Data Architecture Design Sprint clearly embraces Object Oriented programming as a principle design decision. The way Drupal handles SQL queries is also likely to change dramatically for Drupal 7. A move to a PDO based solution looks likely, and if Chx has been posting provocative ideas that would combine PDO and object oriented code. None of this would be possible without GoPHP5.
While this now seems like the natural progression for Drupal, it wasn't an easy sell. Many thought at the time we launched the site that we were setting ourselves up to alienate our user base and break Drupal. The final results will have to wait until the release of Drupal 7 to be seen, but I think we're off to a good start.
Many Drupal developers are excited about the features in PHP 5.2.x and we can hardly wait to start using them in development. Not too recently, however, it was unclear how soon we’d be able to use these features. People worried that if we broke backwards compatibility with PHP 4 we’d lose audience due to the low penetration rate of PHP 5 among web hosts. To fix this, Larry Garfield, Marc Delisle and I launched GoPHP5. We recruited 118 software projects and 208 web hosts to commit to making their default PHP version 5.2.x as of February 5th, 2008. It worked well; shortly after we launched and released our press release, the PHP development team also announced the end of development for PHP 4. Thus the momentum behind PHP 5 has built nicely and we can safely develop Drupal 7 with all of the nice PHP 5 features like PDO, Simple XML and OOP.
