Many Drupal developers are excited about the features in PHP 5.2.x and we can hardly wait to start using them in development. Not too recently, however, it was unclear how soon we’d be able to use these features. People worried that if we broke backwards compatibility with PHP 4 we’d lose audience due to the low penetration rate of PHP 5 among web hosts. To fix this, Larry Garfield, Marc Delisle and I launched GoPHP5. We recruited 118 software projects and 208 web hosts to commit to making their default PHP version 5.2.x as of February 5th, 2008. It worked well; shortly after we launched and released our press release, the PHP development team also announced the end of development for PHP 4. Thus the momentum behind PHP 5 has built nicely and we can safely develop Drupal 7 with all of the nice PHP 5 features like PDO, Simple XML and OOP.
