Lets Go PHP5

I felt it was time to just come out and say it. It’s time every Hawk Host customers goes PHP5 and that will happen by default starting February 1st. PHP5 includes lots of great improvements which are not compatible with PHP4 resulting in most developers currently not taking advantage of the features. As a result of this even scripts compatible with PHP5 are simply PHP4 scripts with a few fixes to make it work in both versions. As a result the new features are not being taken advantage of by developers and the blame is on hosts like us and you the web site.

Now the Hawk Host site is not guilty of this we have been running PHP5 exclusively since the site went live and if I remember right the Devoted Host site was even built on PHP5. We make use of the autoload function on the Hawk Host website to help build a very simple CMS system which we can quickly expand on or change things. We also make use of the Model View Controller pattern which almost all frame works are now doing including Zend Framework.

We are also doing PHP5 right unlike a lot of hosts who just threw up PHP5 as a secondary and never thought, well what features may needed to be added that were not part of PHP4. We do actually compile a more complete PHP5 which includes PDO (PHP Data Objects), PDO MySQL, mysqli (Mysql Improved). We also are promoting Zend Framework which is an exclusive PHP5 framework by making it a default include in our PHP5 installs.

Now I know a lot of you out there are not prepared to make use of PHP5 features but this should not stop you from making use of PHP5. It does not only add features but it also improves speed in numerous instances. So you can switch to PHP5 now just to show developers that PHP5 is in fact going mainstream and you just need applications written specifically for it.

I hope I’ve now convinced you that you should switch to PHP5 now opposed to waiting until we make PHP5 default on February 1st. So here is a quick tutorial on how to get your site running PHP5 with us. So here is a step by step guide

1. Login to your sites cPanel

2. Find the PHP configuration option in cPanel

3. On the next page you want to select what you want to have .php pages be parsed with by default which in our case will be PHP5 and then click update.

Congratulations you are now running PHP5 on your website. Now just quickly go make sure your web site works fine in since that would be bad if it had a bunch of errors. If your site is working fine you’re helping with the PHP5 movement!