Tag Archives: upgrade

11 Feb
2016

PHP 7.0 (and 5.6) on Ubuntu

PHP 7 is released but for those of us who don’t usually compile our own PHP, it can be a long wait for our preferred distro to release the packages we want. For Ubuntu, I’m using a PPA which allows both PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.0 to be installed, including things like extensions, at the same time. It was very easy to set up (I’m running Ubuntu 15.10 but this process should also work on older versions back to at least 14.04 which is the previous LTS) so here’s a quick walkthrough of what I did. Continue reading →
04 Jun
2013

PHP Version Adoption

PHP runs over 75% of all websites whose technologies are known (source: w3techs), which makes for a really REALLY long tail of users who once installed wordpress, phpmyadmin, or some other open source project that helped their business needs at the time. What they don’t do is upgrade. PHP’s current usage statistics look like this (source and raw numbers are if you want them):

PHP Version Adoption

What’s alarming about this is that the left half of this graph represents unsupported versions of PHP. PHP 5.2 has been end of life since January 2011. This doesn’t mean that you can’t use it any more, but it does mean that in terms of security updates, you are out of luck. Some distributions will try to retro-fit some of the fixes but essentially your PHP applications seem a bit lacklustre because, well, you’re using technology from 2006. Continue reading →