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.

Johannes Schlüter has a new post on his site today saying "so long and thanks for all the fish" to the PHP 5.3.x series of releases. With PHP 5.3.29 being released yesterday, that marks the end of the release cycle for the 5.3 series. He takes a bit to look back and reflect on how far things have come during the 5.3.x series, its history and his role as the release master.

PHP 5.3's history starts somewhere in 2005. We knew what a pressure point of PHP was - a language made for solving The Web Problem needs a good Unicode story. [...] As this was a big and pressing issue and the need was obvious and the solution looked promising it was quickly areed on making that the base for a future PHP 6. And then time passed, initial enthusiasm passed and the sheer amount of work became obvious. Two years in we noticed that the ongoing PHP 6 work blocked other work - new features couldn't be added to 5.2, the current version at that time, and adding them to (at that time) CVS's HEAD.

He talks about Lukas Smith getting involved as the "co-release manager" for the series and the contribution he made to the project. He mentions the over five thousand commits and around eighty people that contributed to the releases and the over ten thousand files that were changed. Major features were introduced during this series including namespacing, anonymous functions, goto and late static binding. He also talks more meta about the process the PHP development follows and how things changed over the 29 bugfix releases in the 5.3.x series.

Thank you Johannes and Lukas for all that you've done to get PHP 5.3 to where it is today and your work ensuring the introduction of these major features made it out in a timely manner.

The PHP.net site has announced both the release of PHP 5.3.29 and a reminder that the PHP 5.3.x series is coming close to its "end of life" date.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.3.29. This release marks the end of life of the PHP 5.3 series. Future releases of this series are not planned. All PHP 5.3 users are encouraged to upgrade to the current stable version of PHP 5.5 or previous stable version of PHP 5.4, which are supported till at least 2016 and 2015 respectively. PHP 5.3.29 contains about 25 potentially security related fixes backported from PHP 5.4 and 5.5

If you're using any release in the PHP 5.3.x series, it's highly recommended you either update to this latest version or you make the jump up to something in the PHP 5.4 or 5.5 series. You can get this latest release either from the main downloads page or for Windows users the windows.php.net site. The full change log can be found here.

On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a recent post walking you through your first steps with Lithium, one of the first frameworks that was targeted specifically at PHP 5.3.

Lithium is a lean but mean PHP framework (machine?) built for PHP 5.3 and up. It is designed to provide a good toolset for starting your web application, but one that is not too confining. Lithium uses the Model-View-Controller(MVC) architecture and this is what we are going to look at in this article. I will show you how it works and how you can define some of your application’s business and presentation logic using this framework.

They provide the example code you'll need to follow along with the tutorial over on GitHub, creating a basic content output system. The tutorial shows you how to create controllers, make views and connect models to the tables in your database. Finally they tie it all together and make a "page" function that fetches the content by ID and displays it out to the user.

In this new post to her blog Lorna Mitchell takes a look at some of the current statistics around PHP version adoption - all the way from the ancient 5.0 through the shiny new (upcoming) 5.5 releases.

PHP runs over 75% of all websites whose technologies are known (source: w3techs), which makes for a really REALLY long tail of users who once installed wordpress, phpmyadmin, or some other open source project that helped their business needs at the time. What they don't do is upgrade. PHP's current usage statistics look like this (source and raw numbers are if you want them):

She points out that around half of the results show that sites are running on unsupported versions of PHP (<=5.2) but notes that it's not always their choice. There's lots of factors that play into upgrading these versions that are not always in the user's control (like the speed of distro updates). She covers some of the things that came around in the newer versions of PHP 5.2 and 5.3 including some large performance jumps, especially in 5.4.

In truth, the future is already here for those people on PHP 5.4 and beyond. Keeping PHP upgraded is just part of our regular maintenance workflow, and the language is progressing in regular and manageable steps. If you've been left behind then I strongly recommend that you start making plans for upgrading your platform, or moving to a newer one.

According to this new report on the W3 Techs site, the usage of PHP 5.2 has been passed up by the numbers for the usage of PHP 5.3 (finally).

PHP 5.3 has been released in June 2009, so it took a while to gain that level of popularity. End of support for PHP 5.2 has been declared in December 2010, but is was still the most popular version until now. Version 5.3 will enter the end-of-life cycle in March 2013. Version 5.4, used by only 3.0%, is now considered state-of-the-art.

The numbers have been consistently trending towards intersection with the usage of PHP 5.4 picking up, but no where near the 5.3 and 5.2 numbers. They also point out that PHP version adoption has a history of being slow. Contributing factors to this could be the overall impression of the language and how much "room for improvement" it seems to have.

It's not difficult to predict that PHP as a language will continue to dominate web development in the near future. What will be more exciting is to watch what new versions of PHP will look like.

The main PHP.net site has the release announcement for the two latest versions of the language - PHP 5.3.3 and PHP 5.2.14.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.3.3. This release focuses on improving the stability and security of the PHP 5.3.x branch with over 100 bug fixes, some of which are security related. All users are encouraged to upgrade to this release. [...] The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.14. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with over 60 bug fixes, some of which are security related.

The announcements list some of the major security enhancements and fixes in both new versions as well as a few new features like updates to the PCRE libraries and more.

Note: this PHP 5.2.14 release marks the end of active support for the PHP 5.2.x branch. It is encouraged that you upgrade to PHP 5.3 by following the steps in this migration guide.

As announced on PHP.net - the latest release candidate in the PHP 5.3 series has been made available for download - PHP 5.3.0RC1.

The PHP development team is proud to announce the availability of the first release candidate of PHP 5.3.0 (PHP 5.3.0RC1). This release marks the final phase in a major improvement in the 5.X series, which includes a large number of new features, bug fixes and security enhancements.

Key features of this new release include: namespaces, late static binding, better garbage collection, mysqlnd driver support, new bundled extensions (like phar, intl, fileinfo and sqlite3) as well as many, many bug fixes. You can find out more about all of the changes in this version, check out the NEWS file and can download the release candidate from the QA site here.