Hey, Smurkas
Thanks for your feedback.
I wrote the plugin in PHP 5.3 quite simply because that’s what I use. Everything I write in PHP – with very few exceptions – is for version 5.3. I am fond of the new features, particularly namespaces, which give us a much more elegant way of organising code – naturally – so there’s no good reason for me to use anything else.
I wrote Portico to help me out on a personal project – again, based on PHP 5.3 – and open-sourced it because I thought there may be others who would find it useful.
I agree that I may be limiting my audience, but working with an older version of PHP from day-one, when 5.3 has been gold for 18 months or so, doesn’t make a lot of sense to me – and that’s discounting the fact that I like using the features of PHP 5.3. I could well be wrong, but I think now is the time people start looking more closely at PHP 5.3, because hosts are starting to roll-out PHP 5.3 to users of shared hosting – which should rapidly increase its use.
That said, however, if I get a lot of requests from prospective users, developers working with 5.2, then maybe I’ll consider down-grading the code. (That still sounds a bit bonkers to me, though: rather than upgrading to PHP 5.3, we down-grade code. Anyways.)
Perhaps you could publish a patch for PHP 5.2 users, since you’ve done all the work.
Thanks again
Oh, and sorry for taking so long to get back to you – I’ve been a bit under the weather.
Thanks for the answer!
I just want to say that in theory I agree with you and I also think we should be trying to move forward but realistically we’re still a long way away. Support for the 5.2 line just ended though so you never know.
I personally think the bigger players like WordPress should push the button on this issue since if WordPress went 5.3 then a huge amount of people and hosts would have to switch but right now, the incentive isn’t strong enough.
The numbers are about 6 months old but then 3.56% of the WordPress community and Ilias latest stats found here put 5.3 adoption at 4% so it seems like there at least isn’t a bias against 5.3 in the WordPress community.
A potential user base of about 4% is very small but if the goal is just sharing your stuff then more power to you. I might be able to keep an updated 5.2 branch running, at least as long as you don’t start using late static binding or __callStatic().
