How many versions of php are there and how can they affect your website

The development of php Let's start with the assumption that php is a constantly evolving programming language and that a new version of each branch is released approximately every month. As I write this article, three branches of PHP are officially supported, versions 5.4, 5.5 and 5.6.

Each php development branch (for example that of version 5.5) is supported for two years starting from its first released version, during this period resolutions to operational and security bugs are released regularly based on the reports that the community regularly receives from all php developers in the world.

After these first two years, each branch is still supported for a whole year, but only for any security problems and no longer for operational ones.

What versions of php are officially supported at the moment?

PHP version 5.4: This version is maintained by the community exclusively for security-related fixes, so we are in the last year of support after the first two years of "active" support. On September 14, 2015 the PHP team will send this version to EOL (End Of Life, which literally means "end of life"), which will no longer receive any type of update starting from this date.

PHP Version 5.5: Version 5.5 is in its active support phase (the first two years) which will end on June 20, 2015, then it will go EOL on June 20, 2016, i.e. after one year of only security updates starting from the end of active support.

PHP version 5.6: Version 5.6 is in its active support phase, its first release was released on August 28, 2014 so it is the youngest PHP version currently supported. Until August 28, 2016 it will enjoy active support (resolution of operational and security bugs) until it will be sent to EOL on August 28, 2017.

Which version of PHP should you adopt then? Which version of PHP should an internet provider like us make available to its users? Immediately the first answer that comes to mind is "All supported!" but we always try to act based on the real needs of our users and, a few months ago when we were preparing to decide which and how many versions of PHP to make available on our hosting in addition to versions 5.3 and 5.4 at the beginning of 2015, we decided to proceed in another way. As you may have read from our previous two articles on the spread of CMS on our hosting platforms, 75% of our users use Joomla! And of this 75%, 30% still use version 1.5. Here a small problem arises, on the joomla.org website we find a fairly direct page which tells us that version 1.5 does not work correctly with PHP version 5.4 and higher, what should we do then?

This is how we are working for our customers

Since last week our systems team has started performing php and apache web server updates on the hosting machines, here's how they are doing it in detail.

Our update procedure involves checking the versions of the CMS present within our hosting and, based on the version used, setting the PHP version best suited to that specific version of that specific CMS.

We have decided to leave users with older versions of joomla! and other "dated" CMS the possibility of continuing to use version 5.3 of PHP for a certain period of time (even if no longer supported), we will then start with a specific communication plan in the months to come (with dedicated advice and tutorials) to push these users to migrate to more updated versions of their CMS and therefore to supported versions of PHP.

To all other users with updated CMS versions, the PHP 5.5 version will be made available, with the possibility of choosing version 5.6 from our control panel.

Users in one or the other group therefore receive specific and diversified communications and will be informed about the version of PHP that we are preparing to make available to them, with specific information on the maintenance and development cycle of their version.

Why is it important to use new versions of php for the user? Using the new versions of php 5.5 and 5.6 is truly rewarding!

By examining websites developed in Joomla! and WordPress, we found an improvement in performance (speed of access to the website, compilation of scripts in PHP and use of RAM memory) of almost 40% compared to the old versions of PHP 5.3 and 5.4.

Do we also want to talk about cache management in PHP 5.5 and 5.6?

The Opcache extension, available on all our hosting types, improves PHP performance by storing precompiled scripts in RAM memory, thus eliminating the need to load and parse scripts at each request and thus greatly reducing the loading time of each individual page. Important platforms such as moodle or prestashop recommend on their websites the use of Opcache on hosting servers to improve performance and therefore the speed of access to the website.

Important update also for the Apache web server

There is also news for Apache, the web server that underlies the functioning of PHP which will be updated from version 2.2 to 2.4, I asked our systems engineer Giuseppe Patania what the differences will be compared to the old version used, this is his answer:

"The improvements will be evident: several modules (such as mod_ssl, mod_cache, mod_include) have been revised and updated, others have been added by improving and replacing the old ones (for example mod_sed replaces and extends the functionality offered by mod_substitute), furthermore Apache 2.4 uses a smaller amount of memory compared to its predecessor. Overall performance also improves thanks to MPM Event, the new process management module which, with this version, exits the development and becomes fully supported."

Finally, which version of PHP do you prefer and which one do you use locally for development? Write it in the comments and share the article on social networks!