UseBB Community

a good majority of hosts only havve the latest version of 4. why not just write the new codebase in oop, but maintain the php4 compatability?

At the time that UseBB 2.0 will be out most probably all 'major' hosts will support php5..

php5 came out july 13 2004 (i googled it), i doubt another 4 or 5 months will get many hosts to support php5. php5 has already had many many revisions and yet no major host supports it.

(rant) where's the edit button?(/rant)

here's a nice article published over a year ago that is still very true today.
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2005/02/15/whats-keeping-you-from-php5/

We chose PHP 5 because it is probably more future proof than PHP 4. UseBB 2 isn't meant to be released very soon, the work on it has just started.

I think the arguments in that article are very weak. You can't run PHP 4 and 5 as an Apache module simultaneously, however many hosts offer the option to switch PHP versions for an entire account or even use seperate extensions for PHP 5.

Relying on underlying behaviour isn't good ofcourse, but we won't suffer from that as we will start in PHP 5 right away. Even UseBB 1.0 runs on PHP 5.

So, I don't see any reason to stick with PHP 4.

usebb runs on php5 because php5 is backwards compatible (right?). From what i understand, php5 is a lot like php4 except with much more oop functionality; if you're going to code it specifically using php5 only features, it will not work with php4 like usebb1 does. I understand that you want to be futureproof, but php5 isn't really a new thing, as i pointed out earlier, it's been out for a very long time and has very few people persuing it.

i'm only making a big deal out of this because i'm using free hosting and they don't plan on php5 anytime soon.

There are other reasons why I use PHP 5. One is we are using a database layer using PDO (only available in PHP 5.1). Another reason is we can use newer PHP functions; until today some functions needed to be coded in PHP because they didn't exist in our minimum PHP version.

We will see when UseBB 2 gets ready. After all UseBB 1 remains supported for as long as PHP 4 is used.

It's good to see someone planning a project built around php5. I really don't understand why so many hosts have not upgraded to it yet. I guess there are just a ton of old scripts laying around that require php4 still.

PHP 5's OOP is very improved over the OOP engine included in PHP 4. It opens this project up to so many things there is really no reason not to make the jump. If you're stuck on PHP 4 after 2.0 comes out I'm sure you'll be able to manage with 1.x until your host upgrades, or you can always find a new host (there are many out there that support PHP 5 now).