The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only," project organizers said on the PHP Web site on Friday. "We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until Aug. 8, 2008.
"PHP 5 has been, from an adoption point of view, a complete flop. Most estimates place it in the single-digit percentages or at best the low teens," Matt Mullenweg, the founder of the WordPress blogging software and site, which uses PHP, said on his blog.
"Now the PHP core team seems to have decided that the boost their failing product needs is to kill off their successful one instead of asking the hard questions: What was it that made PHP 4 so successful?...Why wasn't PHP 5 compelling to that same audience?
Are the things we're doing in PHP 6 crucial to our core audience or simply 'good' language problems to solve?"
In an interview Monday, Gutmans disputed the PHP 4 popularity statistics, saying that 80 percent of Zend's customer base has already moved to PHP 5 and that the PHP community was "conservative" in choosing the date for ending PHP 4 support.
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