There can be two very different schools of thought when something new comes out. On one side, you have the people who have to have the latest as soon as it arrives, and will happily be out with the old in favour of the new. Then you have their opposites, the people who cling tenaciously to the tried and tested, refusing to move on whilst clinging to an ‘if it’s not broken, don’t fix it’ mentality. Of course many of us meander somewhere in the middle, and it often takes a major event or effort to force change (‘organic’ change would seem to take a lot longer).

A similar story can be told about the life and times of PHP 5. This most recent version of PHP is around 3 years old, and yet there are comparatively few applications that use it. This is because PHP is quite an integral part of many sites and the applications that run on them, and there are compatibility issues between versions 4 and 5. Namely – a PHP 4 site is likely to find that PHP related sections will stop working on a PHP 5 server – and PHP 5 won’t work on a PHP 4 server. Because of this, a lot of web hosts have been reluctant to install PHP 5 – as the demand was low and outweighed by the complications of not supporting PHP 4. As the years have advanced, the stress on the community involved in developing with PHP has risen, while the lack of development without PHP 4 support has kept the situation in an unhappy limbo. You can read about it in a lot more detail on the GoPHP5 website, here.

So, as I mentioned, many of us happily meander when change is involved. A lot of web users don’t really know a lot about PHP, or what version they are running – they just know, for instance, that their Blogging software or their eCommerce platform works and they are happy with it. I’ve spent a decent amount of time on Technical Support, and many people without even being stupid don’t know what version of Microsoft Outlook they are using, let alone have any direct interaction with their site (they employ Web Designers for that – and they, of course, are drawn towards risk free, powerful solutions, in this case involving the existing PHP 4 support and applications). You also have the ‘home’ user who builds their own site, who, again, would be drawn, presumably, to easy to use, well supported platforms, unlikely to alienate themselves from the majority of the market by throwing their lot in with PHP 5.

We’ve decided to take the plunge, so to speak, and we now fully support PHP 5.2. By fully support I mean we can provide a Hosting solution for users of PHP 4 and 5 (but not at the same time – you have to make your choice!), as we have just finished putting the final cherry on top of a brand new server, running the latest PHP version (instead of the most widely used). Maybe one day we will upgrade PHP across the board instead of splitting the installed versions between different servers, but for now it seems the best way of moving forward, without causing any trouble with the people using our Hosting at the moment. After all, change is good, but not all revolutions have to be violent!

A large part of our decision has been due to the hotly anticipated release of an Open Source eCommerce platform that we’ve been looking forward to for a while now – Magento. Magento needs PHP 5.2 and a quality server to run quickly, and we believe it is well worth the effort of upgrading for. We like customisable, powerful, user friendly products (they make us think of our Control Panel), and Magento is hard to beat. They believe that ‘each solution should be as unique as the business behind it’ and it is a mantra that is backed up with the amount of options available to the user for configuring, managing and personalising their eCommerce site.

This post isn’t here so we can throw a shameless plug in your direction. We genuinely feel that Magento is a glimpse of the future – it looks good, it feels good, it works well and it doesn’t require a giant manual to work out what you’re doing with it. It’s well worth checking out the site and investigating the two online demos, of a potential Front End and the Administration section. We’re also eagerly awaiting the release of Parallel’s one-click installation service, so that setting up Magento will be seamlessly integrated with our Control Panel. Though it has to be said that the manual installation is very easy, and just a little more complicated than installing Wordpress.

Oh, yes. Did I mention that it is free?

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