iBlog - Ilia Alshanetsky

Damien has published the November stats for PHP usage and the year to date summary and a few interesting trends emerge.

It would seem that despite a 300% growth (from <4% to >12%) in PHP 5.X usage in 2006, it still only commands about 12% of the entire PHP user base. Majority of people still use PHP 4 and when it comes to upgrading (as you can see from a drop in <4.3 usage and the rise if 4.4 usage) upgrade to latest 4 version. So, the question emerges, why are people not upgrading to PHP 5 and what can be done to help ease the migration?

Some of the old complains about speed have already been addressed, and in our tests 5.2 shows to be faster then any prior version of PHP to date. There have also been an enormous amount of work done to make things stable, if you look at the open PHP 4 bugs, you'll note that most of them include notes indicating that the issue was resolved in PHP 5. The migration pains are also nearly non-exists as you can see from this talk, vast majority of PHP 4 code will work without changes on PHP 5.

As a 5.X release master, I am very interested in hearing what's holding back 5.X adoption and what can we, as the developers do in 2007 to help speed of 5.X adoption.