Just curious as to how hosting companies are planning to deal with PHP 5.3.x support, since it has the potential to break more things than a normal point release. My understanding is that the CPanel folks haven't got it rolled in yet, although they are getting closer. I'd assume there are a few likely alternatives for hosts:

1) make it available now - probably fairly rare, although I notice that Idologic and a couple of others I've run into seem to have done so

or, once the Cpanel folks have it integrated,

2) upgrade from 5.2 to 5.3 (I'd guess lots of support hassles for shared hosting providers)

3) Offer 5.2 and 5.3 as dual options like the PHP 4/5 days

4) hold off making 5.3 available at all indefinitely to avoid support hassles

I thought it might be interesting to hear from some of the hosting companies active here on what they're been thinking of doing for PHP 5.3. I know that most of the people that really want 5.3 available right now are also likely to have VPS or dedicated hosting, but hopefully I'm not the only one interested in having this available in a shared hosting setup... ;)

I think option 3) is probably best as there are some things that will break a lot of scripts. For example short tags is one in the form of just <? or if you have someone using <?= (short form to echo something).

So basically like PHP 4/5 days where 4 is default and 5 is optional. So in this case 5.2 default with 5.3 being an optional one.

I would take number 3... On production servers you have to excercise caution as I would not want to break any active scripts.

1) make it available now - probably fairly rare, although I notice that Idologic and a couple of others I've run into seem to have done so


Just to clarify, php 5.2.x is the default, php 4.4.x and 5.3.x are both options, but it's easy to switch to them.

My vote goes for the option #3 there. I suppose that is the way to show how loyal you to your customers and that will be appreciated indeed

I think option 3) is probably best as there are some things that will break a lot of scripts. For example short tags is one in the form of just <? or if you have someone using <?= (short form to echo something).

So basically like PHP 4/5 days where 4 is default and 5 is optional. So in this case 5.2 default with 5.3 being an optional one.

I echo this!

Just for anyone coming across this thread, Hawkhost now supports (http://forums.hawkhost.com/topic/1088-php53-support/) PHP 5.3 (hooray). I'm assuming this is now baked into Cpanel and more hosts will start supporting it.

Just for anyone coming across this thread, Hawkhost now supports (http://forums.hawkhost.com/topic/1088-php53-support/) PHP 5.3 (hooray). I'm assuming this is now baked into Cpanel and more hosts will start supporting it.

It's not baked into cPanel in anyway. They do not support multiple PHP 5.x versions and from the feature request thread we found they have no intentions of ever supporting more than one 5.x versions. So this is a custom setup in order to support both versions. Any other provider wishing to do the same will need to do a custom setup like we did.

In that case, an even bigger hooray to the Hawk-folks. I remember months ago when shopping around that 5.3 support was working its way through the CPanel development, but I guess that is just for using 5.3 as the sole PHP supported in a setup. I use a Mac personally, and OSX Snow Leopard comes configured with 5.3, and I was getting close to the point where I was reluctantly going to have to leave my nice, cheap reliable Hawkhost package. Glad they put in the work to do this.

I wonder what CPanel hosts are going to do. 5.3 has some oddities that may cause occasional problems, so they'll still be loathe to switch from 5.2, but it also has some nifty features and there are eventually going to be packages out there that require it (not to mention oddballs like me). I would have thought the CPanel folks would have learned from the 4.x/5.x conversion and anticipated hosts wanting to support multiple PHP setups.

I would have thought the CPanel folks would have learned from the 4.x/5.x conversion and anticipated hosts wanting to support multiple PHP setups.


Apparently PHP 6 would be easily supported. It's doing PHP 5.2, PHP 5.3, PHP 5.4 etc. etc. that it's not designed around.


You can see the discussion about it here: http://forums.cpanel.net/f145/multiple-php-5-x-versions-136101.html

I wonder what CPanel hosts are going to do. 5.3 has some oddities that may cause occasional problems, so they'll still be loathe to switch from 5.2, but it also has some nifty features and there are eventually going to be packages out there that require it (not to mention oddballs like me).

It's trivial to run both php 5.3, php 5.2 and other versions. In fact we've been doing that since mid last year.

As TonyB mentioned, you could do the same for php6.

Well i'm not a hoster, but the only difference i imagine would be whether a hosting company wants to run PHP 5.3.x with FPM or just run the old FastCGI instead as that's really the only benefit i've seen so far from 5.3.X

Well i'm not a hoster, but the only difference i imagine would be whether a hosting company wants to run PHP 5.3.x with FPM or just run the old FastCGI instead as that's really the only benefit i've seen so far from 5.3.X


namespaces
late static binding
anonymous functions
performance improvements


A more detailed list can be seen here: http://php.net/releases/5_3_0.php


Then you have frame works already being designed around the new feature set such as Zend Framework 2.0 http://framework.zend.com/wiki/display/ZFDEV2/Home .