[wp-hackers] WordPress moving to PHP 5.3x?

[Mike Schinkel]

On Jul 12, 2012, at 12:59 PM, Otto wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 11:31 AM, Mike Schinkel <mike at newclarity.net> wrote:
>> - How soon is it likely for WordPress to move to 5.3, especially considering how much debate was had moving from 4 to 5.x?
> 
> http://wordpress.org/about/stats/
> 
> Almost three quarters of the WordPress userbase is still on PHP 5.2.
> 
> I wouldn't expect that to change soon.

Thanks.  Very helpful.

On Jul 12, 2012, at 1:46 PM, Michael D Adams wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 9:31 AM, Mike Schinkel <mike at newclarity.net> wrote:
>> Then today someone on our team found KeyRing[1] which "requires PHP 5.3+ to work, because it makes use of some modern features in PHP like late static binding and abstract classes."[2].  This plugin's authors include Automattic and 3 others who I think are Automattic employees so I'm wondering it this is a (semi-official) statement of support for 5.3?
> 
> Actions by Automattic should not automatically be taken to be guiding
> lights in WordPress' development.  While I'm happy to be a member of
> both Automattic and the WordPress community, those two entities are
> very different things :)
> 
> We (Automattic) developed Keyring for WordPress.com (correction: see
> PS), which is PHP 5.3.  As you've obviously noticed, some things are
> way easier in PH 5.3 :) That's really the only reason Keyring requires
> PHP 5.3: because development was easier and simpler, not because we
> think WordPress should soon move to requiring it.
> 
>> - Why did KeyRing choose 5.3?  Was it really needed, or just preference?  Did they paint 5.2 out of the picture on purpose, or was if a detail they really didn't think about?
> 
> Preference.  We thought about it.  We decided it wasn't worth the
> extra headache to support PHP 5.2.  Though there's been interest from
> the community around Keyring, it's probably not something any given
> site will need.  If it convinces someone to upgrade to 5.3, so much
> the better, but that decision may not be a good one for your
> plugin/theme.  It's certainly a horrible one for core at the moment.

Also extremely helpful. Thanks for taking the time to answer.

I could seriously see integrating KeyRing support into what we are building, but if we stick with 5.2.4 which is what we are learning toward, then the 5.3 requirement would be a non-starter.  

I'm curious, which specific 5.3 features did you use?  I scanned the code but I couldn't find anything obvious.  And are the PHP 5.3-specific features essential to the architecture or simply for convenience?  IOW, would a "KeyRing 5.2" fork be viable and maintainable?  Thanks in advance.

-Mike