[wp-hackers] readme.txt: "Requires PHP 5 tag"

[Aaron D. Campbell]

Most of my plugins require PHP5+ 
<http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/profile/aaroncampbell>. Notice that 
I add "Requires PHP5" right into the main plugin description, which 
helped a lot. Also, make some sort of canned response for the questions 
you get similar to this:

The plugin requires PHP 5 and you’re running PHP 4. Most hosts offer 
PHP5 but you probably have to enable it in your control panel, through 
.htaccess, or by asking them.

As for switching to PHP 5, there's been rumors of switching in 3.0, but 
I'm sure that'll be based on stats collected. I think Matt said that 
they already have 80+% of WordPress installs using PHP5+, but he didn't 
know the exact number. Either way, it's definitely been discussed to 
death on this list.

Lutz Schröer wrote:
> I've decided to use exclusively PHP5 in my new plugin version since it 
> was much easier to code it using the PHP5 features. Unfortunately many 
> users seem to have no access to webspace with PHP5 (five years after 
> PHP5 was released!).
>
> I have prevented people from updating through the backend 
> programmatically but those who are downloading the plugin from 
> wordpress.org and installing it manually often do not read the 
> readme.txt and wonder about a "Parse error: syntax error, unexpected 
> T_CLASS".
>
> How about adding a "Requires PHP version x.xx" tag to the readme.txt 
> that will be displayed on the extend pages? And maybe the backend 
> could evaluate this tag, too, and disable the update if the installed 
> version does not fit.
>
>
> ... and even if this topic has been discussed a thousand times: Let's 
> drop the PHP4 support!
>
> Latz