As the author of the original post about WordPress and PHP and approaching the problem for the WordPress side, I will agree with you wholeheartedly. No, I’m not a core developer. Yes, I write *some* patches. But I’ve also been around the WordPress dev world for YEARS now.

I am not one who is in favor of WordPress maintaining PHP4 compatibility, but at the same time, I know why it’s done. If you read my post, I passed on the 12% of all WordPress users are on PHP4 hosts stat. That number isn’t an exact number. It might be anywhere between 10 and 14%. Still, with the number of WordPress installs in the wild, that represents a chunk of population roughly on par with a major city. We can’t just ignore this number of people.

The WordPress core developers have been very open to gradually introducing PHP5 only code. We’ve seen that with the oEmbed code that is in WordPress 2.9, the SSH method of upgrade and even the HTTP class that Keith mentioned looks for available transports, some of which are PHP5 only. In all of these cases, we have not crippled WordPress if the user is on PHP4 but we’ve given incentives to use new non-blocking features if the host is running PHP5.

I think it’s important that these conversations happen in a constructive way, though. Nobody in the Drupal or WordPress world is going to simply do something because PHP developers get elitist and try to cram it down our throats. Just as much, nobody in the PHP community is going to learn to live and work with WordPress and Drupal developers if we as endpoint communities turn our backs on PHP and just say, “We’re gonna do what we want to and you can #suckit.” Ain’t happening.

Anyways. Onward and upward.

If you must know what I’ve done for PHP and WordPress, here’s a list: I contribute to the PHP documentation on a regular basis. I do lurk on the various PHP mailing lists and attend conferences. I write, as you’ve discovered. I have spoken at OSCON, ZendCon, the DC PHP Developer’s Group, Frederick Web Tech, Baltimore PHP, and Wordcamp Mid-Atlantic.

In terms of moving WordPress forward, I’m developing a plugin for WordPress that highlights whether or not the PHP version and MySQL version are current and asks the user to upgrade if they are not. I will, at some point, submit the plugin as a patch to WordPress core, with the hopes that telling people (who don’t know otherwise) that their PHP installations are less-than-current will spur upgrades and drop that percentage from 12% to near 0%.

All of this doesn’t take into account the discussions, negotiations, talking and working with WordPress community members; things that you don’t see, but do make a difference.

“– I think the point is: It’s easy to criticize and pick at, but without making some fixes and engaging, that doesn’t go anywhere.”

The general thrust of my argument is the same: Brandon is criticizing and picking at, without making a material contribution (at least within the context of this post, if he has elsewhere, I’ll gladly shush) towards a solution.

I’m in particular frustrated that his level of expertise is perhaps lacking in some aspects (not a bad thing by itself), but is used to author advice which is seemingly authoritative and is given a large broadcast platform – ie aggregated via planet PHP. I view large parts of this post as inflammatory.

More on topic:
Within PEAR, we make great efforts to avoid backwards compatibility breaks (mainly PHP 4 compatibility), and artificially prolong the potential life of dead technologies/methodologies.

Countless times, I (and many others) have had to tell a contributor “Thanks, but no thanks – you’ll upset any PHP4 users of package X. Sorry.”.
Every time I’ve had to say that, I feel stupid for maintaining a status quo against a very rational argument and proven: survival of the fittest. There are other paths and alternatives, but it boils down to us having to put red tape and process in front of a perfectly willing and reasonable contributor. That, predictably, makes them a not so willing contributor.

To read a post like this (“don’t criticize bad policy”) feels somewhat insulting to everyone who has tried to improve the entire PHP ecosystem and been rebuffed. In general, these people are writing patches. These patches are often leveraging the abilities of newer technology and methods available in PHP 5+. Unfortunately, we at PEAR (and presumably wordpress) keep having to say “no; PHP4 doesn’t have X.”.

I find this situation to be frustrating, as do many others within PEAR. We’re looking for every possible way we can bend the rules without breaking out promises/BC (Wasn’t stable? It can go PHP 5), provide alternatives (Call it Package_Something2!), and otherwise move the entire state of play forward (PEAR2/pyrus).

If there’s such a movement in the wordpress community, this post would have been a great place to highlight it.

The php community has responded to many needs of the other communities like the wordpress community. I personally think this entire blog post and all of the comments are behind the curve because it won’t be long before everyone realizes that 5.3 will save significant processor cycles with existing code and that = $$$ saved.

This seems the right place and the right moment to discuss about it. Do you agree?

By all means I always looked at the PHP Community as a heterogeneous amount of people trying to overcome each other. In fact I still have this vision. Futhermore it has always been quite isolated from foreign communities (Java, .Net, Ruby) and even worse used to ignore its own community members.
Although I see quite a lot of cohesion as well recently.

The very first thing that the PHP Community should learn from other communities is to give more voice to the damned community members and listen to what they have to say. A good example comes from the Java Community: the Java Community Process, that apart from really formalizing specifications defines a sample of parties whom business is the Java platform that votes the specifications. All this avoid by all means any arbitrary decision from being made.

This takes back to my mind the not so past Namespace separator argument that happened months before the release of PHP 5.3.

There was a RFC on the php wiki that stated “This RFC is the result of a IRC discussion with Greg, Dmitry, Steph, Derick, Elizabeth, Johannes, Andrei, Scott, Hannes and myself [Lukas Smith]” for me this is a lack of respect and confidence of the dev-team toward the PHP Community members. It means that members’ voice doesn’t count in the evolution of the language and this simply doesn’t work.

But this comment is not oriented on the namespace separator di per sé, but as what it represent. It is a indicator of how much PHP cares of us developers, us the community.

[I was quite hurry and I'm not an english speaker, so forgive me grammatical and syntactical mystakes. Please write back in plain english :P]

Automattic is not WordPress. Automattic is WordPress.com. The software itself is community owned and out of the 4 core devs, only 2 work for Automattic (Ryan Boren, Andrew Ozh). Mark Jaquith and Peter Westwood do not. Collectively, they make decisions, some of which may or may not involved turning their back on the PHP community for whatever reasons.

Good article, Brandon.

Moving from a PHP 4, functions fest, mindset to PHP 5 (OOP) would be a whole new world for many of the plugin developers, and possibly core developers. Obviously I would be for moving it towards the PHP 5, possibly 5.3, OOP, but I’ve been developing in PHP 5 for 3-4 years so it isn’t a scary world for me.

Further, WordPress (or whoever) isn’t going to upgrade and update their stuff unless they see value in it. To convince them of the value, we should show them. If we can refactor a plugin or function and show better performance, security, functionality, memory usage, etc, it will get accepted and we can bring everyone along and end everyone’s headaches. :)

And in terms of the personal attacks on Brandon… uncalled for.

And I’m not being negative here, I also am one of those users, and I love WordPress and the plugins and stuff, but as an end-user. Not as a PHP developer. WordPress could be written in RoR and I would still use it the same way.

The only party who we’re talking about when we talk about the relationship between PHP and WordPress is Automattic. And Automattic has basically turned it’s back on the rest of the PHP community. There’s very little we can do about that.

As a WordPress user, and as a developer who sometimes deploys WordPress for clients because it often is the appropriate solution, this worries me because it seems like WordPress is a dead end. We’ve seen succesful projects like this come and go (PHPNuke anyone?), and WordPress seems to lack a long term strategy as an open source project. I suspect Automattic is more interested in the SaaS route, and really doesn’t give a crap about what the outside world thinks about their code. If I’m really paranoid I would say they are deliberately steering WordPress away from the PHP mainstream. They are certainly not interested in having the PHP community contributing to their product.

Provide them with meaningful actions for specific problems. Give them a list of places most in need of refactoring.

With the inflammatory comments you’ve made, you’ve probably just irritated a boatload of the PHP community subscribed to planet PHP (you have at least angered me). What have you offered them by doing so?
The idea that projects who use out of date platforms and methodologies to implement their software on is a Good Thing.
Great idea, that’ll get the respect of the PHP community, and won’t irritate them at all.

Further, why do your posts show up on planet php? They frequently are subtly wrong or naieve, and that irritates me somewhat at an individual level. I can handle it if you are still learning the finer points of programming, but if that’s the case, I would suggest you are in a poor position to dish out advice, specifically in these matters.