PHP 5 upgrade

Our web hosting provider is updating all the servers to work with PHP 5 as the default server side scripting language. Official support for PHP 4 has been discontinued since 2007-12-31.

PHP 4 was running as an Apache module on our server. As part of the upgrade, they are also switching from an Apache module to a CGI module which is more secure because the scripts run under the domain's user name instead of as "nobody."

The upgrade had to be split into two separate operations. Today the Apache module version of PHP 4 was replaced with suPHP, a GCI version. From our point of view as programmers, the main issue is that php flags no longer go into the htaccess file but instead into the php.ini file. These changes are all being done by the web hosing service.

As of October 11, 2008 our server is running PHP version 4.4.9 as a CGI Server/API. In the next few days the server will be upgraded to PHP 5.2.6

captainccs

October 11, 2008