At the beginning of the month I was interviewed by Sean Kerner of InternetNews.com about the GoPHP5.org initiative, and what it means for the state of PHP 5 adoption. The article is entitled "PHP 4 is Dead—Long Live PHP 5" which is a nice tip of the hat to Dries' earlier article PHP IS DEAD ... LONG LIVE PHP!.

The decision to move to PHP 5.2 as the minimum required version for Drupal 7 has already started to influence people's thinking about how Drupal is developed. For example, one of the proposals that came from the recent Data Architecture Design Sprint clearly embraces Object Oriented programming as a principle design decision. The way Drupal handles SQL queries is also likely to change dramatically for Drupal 7. A move to a PDO based solution looks likely, and if Chx has been posting provocative ideas that would combine PDO and object oriented code. None of this would be possible without GoPHP5.

While this now seems like the natural progression for Drupal, it wasn't an easy sell. Many thought at the time we launched the site that we were setting ourselves up to alienate our user base and break Drupal. The final results will have to wait until the release of Drupal 7 to be seen, but I think we're off to a good start.