cmsXperts

In an official note which appeared in the Mambo News website, Mambo project leaders announced that the software will only be supporting PHP5 in the versions to come.

While the current version of the package — 4.6.x — supports both PHP4 and PHP5, the efforts that have to be put into cross-compatibility and the result is that development has been somewhat hampered by this factor. Mambo developers started introducing PHP5-specific features since the 4.6.x versions, although they have now announced that the time is right to migrate to PHP5 only.

PHP4 — they explain — is an “old” version of the language, released in 2000 and, while still usable for many purposes, it’s certainly not the best platform to develop the future of the Web on, being now deprecated. The Web evolves at an exponential rate and so do the expectations of its users: for this reason, PHP4 support will be dropped starting from version 4.7.x.

PHP5 is not new — it was released in 2004 — but not too old, achieving a good mix of features and stability. That, together with the fact that with the fifth versions comes increased security and better use of resources, was enough for the project leaders to take the final decision, announcing that the next versions will only be compatible with PHP 5.2 and higher and MySQL 4.1 or above.

What does this mean for us webmasters? Those who have been relying on Mambo to build their sites might want to check the technical specifications to see if their hosting service (especially if you are using a cheap hosting) has all the necessary requisites.

To see if the server where you’re hosting your website(s) supports PHP 5.2, the easiest way is to create and upload through your FTP client a .php file containing this simple text:

<?php phpinfo() ?>

At this point, when pointing your browser to your uploaded file, you should see the supported version of PHP at the top of the page. In our case, you can see that the server we tested does indeed support the newest version of PHP and has therefore all the requisites to host a site with the future versions Mambo.

We certainly can’t wait to see what new features Mambo developers will come up in the next future, and we will be definitely covering them as they get released to the public, and hope that the new software requirements won’t prevent you from keep using this excellent content management system.