Lorna Jane Mitchell

Lorna Mitchell is a freelance web development consultant and developer based in Leeds, UK. Lorna is a lead on the Joind.In open source project, an organizer of the PHPNW conference, and a prolific blogger.

4 things that happened in PHP while you weren’t looking

PHP gains some modern features as it heads to a 7.0 release.

Image: CC BY 2.0 Chris Lott https://www.flickr.com/photos/fncll/ via Flickr

I think most programmers have come into contact with PHP at some point, editing a WordPress plugin or getting PHPMyAdmin running on a server. We think we know what PHP is, but the language has been very quietly growing up over the last few years, so here’s some headlines that you might have missed.

Upgrading is easy

PHP has always had frequent patch releases, but now its minor releases are approximately annual. This means that the differences between the versions, and therefore the painful experiences of an upgrade, are much reduced. It also means that there’s probably a relatively new version available at the time when a distro is rolling its new release.

PHP has also developed much greater consideration for its users when upgrading. From PHP 5.3 there is an error_reporting level, E_DEPRECATED, which will log any features you are using which will be removed in the next version of PHP. Nothing gets removed in a minor version that wasn’t already planned to be removed before the release of the previous minor version — so fewer surprises for those of us in userland.

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