With each new major version of the PHP language comes a long list of changes. Along with these changes can come breakage with software that's not a direct part of the PHP core (or extensions). In this post to his site Remi Collet lists out a large number of the more popular PHP extensions and, along with the specific version numbers, breaks down which will work and which won't.

He actually has three lists: "compatible", "work in progress" and "not compatible for now". Fortunately, the "compatible" list is the longest and includes:

• geoip
• ip2location
• redis
• sphinx
• zookeeper
• varnish

There's also a pretty sizable list for the "work in progress" category, most of which are already in the "fixed upstream" category or have pull requests waiting for review to fix issues that were found. Most of the items in the "not compatible" list are either projects that are out of date or have moved away from the PECL extension approach to something more based in user-land code.

In a follow up to his previous post about how PHP is broken (and what can be done to fix it), Court Ewing has this new post with a few suggestions on how PHP development could be better, but admits that PHP itself is not broken.

It is no secret that the PHP development process has never been a shining example of project organization or quality assurance. Until recently, some of the most important aspects of any project's development cycle were either entirely lacking or were ill-defined. Worse, there was little in the form of systemic quality assurance. Fortunately, the core devs did not ignore these issues, and they've been pushing really hard to improve on these areas over the past few years.

He points out two things that he sees as things that could be improved in the overall process of developing the language - noting that failing automated tests are ineffective and that communication is a key factor in the trust developers have in PHP.

The core PHP developers have long been a key component of [the amazing things the language can do], and none of progress that modern PHP applications have made would be possible without their ongoing efforts. As a result of those efforts, PHP is a stable, secure, and beautifully-practical language that is both easy for novices to wrap their heads around and experts to build the most-used web applications the world has ever seen.