Our next ExpressionEngine release will mark the end of PHP 4 support in ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter. For most of you, this should be a non-issue. PHP 4 was originally released in May of 2000 and reached End of Life in December of 2007.  If you think about it, PHP 4 is to us what Internet Explorer 6 is to you.

We will be requiring PHP 5.1.6. The easiest way to see if your current host meets the requirements is to download and test using the Server Wizard. If your host does not meet the minimum requirements, open a support ticket and work with them to upgrade your account to PHP 5. In the majority of cases, this should be trivial.

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Ohh this sounds great!

One question tho: Why not use Services_Json for encoding json too?

Why not use Services_Json for encoding json too?

The main reason is that it’s slow. It does a lot of checking and converting to get to UTF-8. In EE 2 all of the data that goes in or out is UTF-8, so those checks are superfluous for us. Encoding in the same character set is incredibly simple, so we wrote our own.

The need to decode came about a little later, although we knew that we would eventually need it. It is quite a bit more more complicated and time was limited, so we grabbed what was available and never got around to rolling our own version.

There are still a few loose ends in the javascript library, so hopefully we’ll have a native implementation for CI 2’s release.

Good question!

Finally. Thank you.

This has to be bitter-sweet for you guys. After all your struggles building EE 2 with php 4 (I’m sure there were plenty), this decision comes only 4 months since EE 2 was out of beta. You could have had autoloading!

Now the question is: why not php 5.2? I know, you’re not utilizing 5.2’s new features yet. Support for multiple databases using PDO would be nice though. Promise that EE 3 will be a complete rewrite on php 5.3 or 6?

Great news folks

Is there any chance of getting some sort of change log for the docs please?

Perhaps if they were maintained publicly by EL on BitBucket then we could subscribe via RSS and see the commits from you guys.

Yup, great news. Now you just need to get rid of all the PHP4-centric code in both CI / EE and we’re good to go

Now the question is: why not php 5.2? I know, you’re not utilizing 5.2’s new features yet.

One thing we’ve discovered is that reliable usage statistics for PHP are pretty hard to find. Server OS statistics are a bit easier. On the linux side, the Red Hat derivatives tend to lag behind a bit. Unfortunately about 40% of linux servers are CentOS or RHEL. CentOS 5.5 and RHEL 5.5 both ship with PHP 5.1.6. The number isn’t random, it’s as high as we can comfortably go at this point.

Is there any chance of getting some sort of change log for the docs please?

We’re being very deliberate with our changes, but we’ll definitely keep you guys in the loop for potential compatibility issues.

Yup, great news. Now you just need to get rid of all the PHP4-centric code in both CI / EE and we’re good to go

Heh, we removed most of the PHP 4 compatibility code from CI. Along with a few other changes, which are outlined on the CI blog. EE is starting to get the same treatment, it’ll just take a little longer .

“We are making changes slowly and deliberately, so expect some flux in the repository for the coming weeks. It’s an exciting time for CI.”

Nice move! Looking forward to see more improvements in the coming weeks. The right time to regain momentum.

I’m very exited with the changes and congrats to the team! I wanted to know what new features are going to be part of CI 2.0. I mean, is UTF-8 fixed? Is there a Javascript abstraction layer somewhere? Things like that. Maybe a roadmap could be shared so we can help in any way, right?

Keep the good work!

NICE!!!
Small gift for the new year we get?

I am, very, very happy

landitus - 14 November 2010 06:32 PM

I’m very exited with the changes and congrats to the team! I wanted to know what new features are going to be part of CI 2.0. I mean, is UTF-8 fixed? Is there a Javascript abstraction layer somewhere? Things like that. Maybe a roadmap could be shared so we can help in any way, right?

Keep the good work!

I’m not sure how Unicode was ever ‘broken’ in CodeIgniter, but there is a new Unicode class.  You can see that and more over at BitBucket

I want to ask something maybe not so relative.
When will be out the No 2 version?

dimi,

Are you referring to ExpressionEngine, or CodeIgniter version 2?

At CodeIgniter version 2