As mentioned in several places (including over on digg.com), the GoPHP5 project has launched their website to help everyone keep tabs on how the push towards PHP5 is going - GoPHP5.org.
The PHP developer community has decided that it is indeed now time to move forward, together. Therefore, the listed software projects have all agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, any new feature releases will have a minimum version requirement of at least PHP 5.2.0. Furthermore, the listed web hosts have agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, they will include PHP 5.2 (or a more recent version) in their service offer.
Included in the site are a list of web hosts that support the GoPHP5 project, software projects that have committed themselves to "being PHP5" by the deadline and - front and center - a countdown timer for how long they have left.
Other sites mentioning the GoPHP5 site/effort:
- Alexey Zakhlestin's blog
- the Syntux.net Blog
- this new post on the Symfony blog
Supporting PHP4 is as limiting to your creativity and website as Netscape4 used to be. But retrofitting PHP 5.2 support is of limited benefit to a PHP4 application because the architecture will still be rooted in the rather less than object-oriented world of PHP4. More ideas of mine at
http://www.silverstripe.com/silverstripe-supports-gophp/?stage=Live