wordpresslogoofficial

The folks at WordPress made an official announcement late last week to inform everyone that they are leaving PHP4 and MySQL4 behind.

They explained the reasons behind this shift:

First up, the announcement that developers really care about. WordPress 3.1, due in late 2010, will be the last version of WordPress to support PHP 4.

For WordPress 3.2, due in the first half of 2011, we will be raising the minimum required PHP version to 5.2. Why 5.2? Because that’s what the vast majority of WordPress users are using, and it offers substantial improvements over earlier PHP 5 releases. It is also the minimum PHP version that the Drupal and Joomla projects will be supporting in their next versions, both due out this year.

According to the announcement post less than 11 percent of current WordPress installs are running on anything less than PHP version 5.2 and less than 6 percent are on MySQL4.  They expect those percentages to start dropping now that this has been announced and hosts realize that in order to support WordPress users they need to upgrade from these older versions.

Why is this important? Well if you need any proof of the sheer number of users of WordPress out there – it has been downloaded more than 10 million times since it was released last month.  Hosts would be smart to be ready for this change.

So are you and your host ready for this change? Wouldn’t it be nice to know your status and then have all this time to discuss it with your host so your ready for these milestones?

Well the WordPress folks can help with this.  They have released a plug-in for your WordPress install called Health Check that has one simple function and that is to tell you whether your hosts versions of PHP and MySQL meet the minimum requirements for these upcoming changes.

healthcheckpluginresults

Well it seems we are good to go here – how about you?