I believe WordPress is now the most popular blog hosting platform in the world and without question it is one of the most installed piece of website software which is why the announcement this week that WordPress will be dropping support for PHP 4 and MySQL4 in their upcoming 3.2 release is very big news.
Mark Jaquith on WordPress.org had this to say “Web hosting platforms, however, change over time, and we occasionally are able to reevaluate some of the requirements for running WordPress. Now is one of those times. You probably guessed it from the title — we’re finally ready to announce the end of support for PHP 4 and MySQL 4!”
This announcement won't be a pressing issue as WordPress 3.2 isn't scheduled for release until sometime in the first half of 2011 but for those users who will need to make upgrades to their web hosting, it's a significant consideration.
As of WordPress 3.2, the software will only support PHP releases 5.2 and above, while not the most recent version of the PHP release it is widely supported and the minimum requirements for running competitor packages such as Joomla and Drupal. PHP is the software language WordPress is coded in, and is required to run the software, the change is expected to affect around 11 percent of WordPress installations.
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Chris, do you know whether the new WordPress version will have an impact on server memory requirements?I already have an issue with my host and their memory usage limits preventing me from upgrading to WP 3.0.1.This might just be an install issue rather than runtime, but I'd be interested to know your thoughts
James, there hasn't been any official word regarding the memory requirements for WordPress 3.2 as of yet but I would assume the updates will come with more code, which of course will always increase memory requirements. I use a plugin called WP System Health myself which does a great job of monitoring my performance here on [bh].