10/7/14 - Scheduled Transition to PHP 5.4

[AndrewT]

Per our post back on August 17th, the PHP 5.3.29 release marks the end of life for PHP 5.3. As such, we will be migrating to PHP 5.4 as the default on our servers. PHP 5.3 will still be available as a secondary option but ultimately it will be removed. The timeline for the removal of PHP 5.3 has yet to be determined and will be announced later.

It is very important that you keep your scripts up-to-date in order to patch any security vulnerabilities that might be addressed within the updates. As long as you've been keeping up with these you should not have any problems with PHP 5.4. If you've neglected to update your scripts over the past year you'll need to make sure these are taken care of otherwise you may find problems with PHP 5.4. As far as custom code is concerned, you should consult your developer to confirm PHP 5.4 compatibility. Overall, though, the changes from PHP 5.3 to 5.4 aren't anywhere near as big as they were from 5.2 to 5.3 and should have far less of an impact, if any, as a result. If you would like to switch to PHP 5.4 early or test your site on it you can simply add the following line to your .htaccess file:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php54 .php

If you find or know that your site will not work with PHP 5.4 you can add the following to your .htaccess file to force PHP 5.3 both now and after the transition:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php53 .php

Note that this should only be used as a temporary solution. Your scripts still need to be fixed or updated to work with PHP 5.4 since PHP 5.3 will be removed in the future. The PHP developers have documentation concerning changes, deprecated features, etc. as this concerns migrating from PHP 5.3 to PHP 5.4 which you can find here.

We will begin transitioning our servers to PHP 5.4 as the default on Tuesday, October 7th.

If you have any questions or concerns please feel free to submit a ticket via our client portal and we'll gladly address them.

[AndrewT]

PHP 5.4 is now the default version on all of our servers. If you find that your site is having issues with this you can temporarily revert to PHP 5.3 by adding the following to your .htaccess file:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php53 .php

Please keep in mind that this should only be used as a temporary solution. You must update or fix the problems with your scripts. PHP 5.3 will be removed entirely at a later date, at which point this temporary fix will not be available. Feel free to submit a ticket if we can be of any assistance although please be advised that we cannot be responsible for fixing or updating your scripts.

A separate announcement will be posted once we've determined a date for the removal of PHP 5.3.

[AndrewT]

If you find that your site is taking a while to load and eventually displays a 503 error as a result of this transition then this typically indicates that you're using a custom php.ini file with incompatible settings. This could be something basic like trying to enable register_globals which is removed as of PHP 5.4 or trying to load old extensions built for a previous version of PHP.

Your can either correct / remove the php.ini file or go ahead and temporarily revert your site to PHP 5.3. If you're actually relying on register_globals, which has been a bad idea for a long time, you'll have to update or edit your scripts to stop doing so. In lieu of a custom php.ini file we do instead recommend just placing the settings that you need to change in your .htaccess file using the appropriate syntax, which differs from that of the php.ini syntax. This makes sure that your settings are applied while preserving our other default settings, extensions, etc.