In short: it's *old*. Any PHP library you'll find these days requires 5.3+.<\/p>\n
Old but still everywhere ?<\/h2>\n
According to W3Techs, 33% of websites<\/a> running PHP are on 5.2. That's a lot, but wait, there's worse.<\/p>\n According to WordPress, more than 50%<\/a> of WordPress-powered sites are still on 5.2. Earlier this week @dd32<\/a> made a pretty graph<\/a> showing that PHP 5.2's share is only slowly decreasing.<\/p>\n Dropping a platform running half of your user base would be crazy, right? For sure. Except I think the numbers are somewhat skewed.<\/p>\n As you may know, my pet project is a self-hosted URL shortener, YOURLS, which was released<\/a> in its version 1.7 earlier this month. This new version comes with a phone-home feature to report the same kind of stats that WordPress is aggregating from its users, and particularly what PHP version YOURLS is installed on.<\/p>\n Of course, the YOURLS user base is nowhere near as important in volume as WordPress' market, but I think the average user is similar, so YOURLS figures should be relevant in some way.<\/p>\n What I've learned since the release of YOURLS 1.7 came as a surprise: I was expecting a similar share to what WordPress reports, but it turns out only 10% of YOURLS installs are running on PHP 5.2<\/strong><\/p>\n What did I conclude from all this?<\/p>\n WordPress is old, it's been around for 10 years. The typical WordPress user installed WP 4 or 5 years ago, when 5.2 was still the standard.<\/p>\n YOURLS is much younger, it's been around for 4 years, but the project sort of picked up 3 years ago with YOURLS 1.5, released in November 2010. The typical YOURLS user installed YOURLS 1 year ago, when the default hosting setting on most host was PHP 5.3 or more.<\/p>\n I think that's the key of the skewed numbers : simply too many WordPress installs were around when PHP 5.2 was the default, and those users just did not upgrade their hosting. Well, why would they, it just works fine.<\/p>\n That would be exhibit A<\/strong> : newer users are on 5.3+, older are still<\/em> on 5.2.<\/p>\n Most host, if not all, still offer 5.2, even if you open an account today, but I could not find any which does not support 5.3+. All the major hosts (Dreamhost, Bluehost, Hostgator, etc…) have 5.3 by default.<\/p>\n And if there is a minor host where PHP 5.2 is the best you can have, then what's the point with signing with a smaller and lesser known company if they cannot provider better services than big ones?<\/p>\n Exhibit B<\/strong>: hosts can give you 5.3+<\/p>\n And that will be exhibit C<\/strong>: WordPress has the power.<\/p>\n WordPress runs on 20% of all websites in the world. That's huge<\/strong>. Moreover, it apparently has 60% of the CMS market<\/a>, which is also very impressive.<\/p>\n Few organizations in the world have the power to say "we're moving to a newer version of PHP" and have a global impact ; WordPress is one of them.<\/p>\nSo what?<\/h2>\n
![\"yourls_php_version\"](\"http:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/yourls_php_version.png\")
<\/p>\n1. Old installs vs<\/em> new installs<\/h2>\n
2. Deeper digging: who's running PHP 5.2?<\/h2>\n
3. WordPress should lead<\/h2>\n