In a recent post to his site Fabian Schmengler has proposed a PHP 5.3 "Death March" in an effort to try to drop PHP 5.3 compatibility for applications and encourage the growth of PHP 5.4 and beyond.

An alarming large amount of websites still runs on PHP 5.3, which does not get updated anymore since 2014/08/14, after one year of “security only” support. In other words, the next critical security hole will only be fixed for versions above 5.4. By the way, active development of the PHP 5.4 branch was discontinued on 2014/09/14. it’s already in the “security only” phase. On 2014/08/28, PHP 5.6 has been released, on 2013/06/20, almost 1.5 years ago, PHP 5.5. So, by now, in the year 2014 everybody should work on PHP 5.5, right? [...] Almost half of the Alexa Top 1M Sites that run on PHP, state the version 5.3, ca. one quarter even 5.2, which is not supported since Jan. 2011. PHP 5.2.17 even is the most used patch version in this statistic.

He goes through some of the thinks might be contributing to this drag in adoption including the slow migration of official Linux distribution packages and the incompatibility of applications and frameworks with newer PHP versions. He makes a few suggestions of what different groups can do to help the cause - developers, project managers and hosting companies. He provides a list of things that are either deprecated in 5.4 or have been completely removed.

Kevin Schroeder has some of his own thoughts on the recent results of the TIOBE index ranking the popularity of programming languages. PHP has slopped down two spots, replaced by Python and C++. He looks at the data TIOBE has to back it up and can't seem to find a reason why.

I decided to take a look and see what was going on behind the scenes by reading on the index definition to see if I could understand what happened. After reading through the definition I still don't know what happened, or even why it happened.

He goes through how the index data is created - search results from the top 6 hits in Alexa for each language result - and how he, basically, found nothing out of the ordinary. He points out that, because of inconsistencies like this, the TIOBE index shouldn't be regarded as much more than a loose guide. Since it's based on hard-coded search strings, it'll never be a true judge of "popularity" overall.

As mentioned by DynamicWebPages.de, the latest PHP usage statistics have been released for November 2006.

Overall, the spread of PHP seems to have settled down this month to a more stable value. For this month, the number of domain using PHP came in at 19 million (19,404,533) and the number of IPs using PHP is at 1.3 million (1,319,743). This drop can be somewhat attributed to several hosts being made aware of the "expose_php" setting in their installations and turning it off for security reasons.

You can check out this month's numbers as well as how it relates to previous months (and years) in this graph.

As mentioned by DynamicWebPages.de, the latest PHP usage statistics have been released for November 2006.

Overall, the spread of PHP seems to have settled down this month to a more stable value. For this month, the number of domain using PHP came in at 19 million (19,404,533) and the number of IPs using PHP is at 1.3 million (1,319,743). This drop can be somewhat attributed to several hosts being made aware of the "expose_php" setting in their installations and turning it off for security reasons.

You can check out this month's numbers as well as how it relates to previous months (and years) in this graph.

The JSLabs website has posted a new list of what they see as the current Top Ten of PHP frameworks out there. It differs slightly from the previous list, including some of the newcomers and dropping some that have fallen behind.

Added to the list were:

• symfony
• Zend Framework
• CakePHP
• Code Igniter
• Prado

And dropped from the list were:

• eZ publish
• Krill
• php-booba
• edit-x
• Binary Cloud

Each of the frameworks in the list have a brief description to give you a feel for what the project is all about.

The JSLabs website has posted a new list of what they see as the current Top Ten of PHP frameworks out there. It differs slightly from the previous list, including some of the newcomers and dropping some that have fallen behind.

Added to the list were:

• symfony
• Zend Framework
• CakePHP
• Code Igniter
• Prado

And dropped from the list were:

• eZ publish
• Krill
• php-booba
• edit-x
• Binary Cloud

Each of the frameworks in the list have a brief description to give you a feel for what the project is all about.