The version of Midgard CMS, version 1.9 will drop support for version 4 of the PHP programming language. The reasons for this are that PHP5 provides better performance and that PHP4 has received an end of life status.

While there has been a lot of discussion around the slow adoption of PHP 5, with some owing it to the success of PHP 4. “The problem of PHP 4 is its own success. Its so big of a success that it is hard to get people to the (sometimes incompatible) next generation versions. It is definitely the apps working with PHP 4 that drive people to use PHP 4, not PHP 4 itself. If crucial apps, like phpMyAdmin were developed for some other technology at their time, then that would become the de-facto everywhere installed programming environment to work with,” says Johan Delinger.

This situation does not apply to Midgard sicne it works on Apache module and PHP extension space the users of the framework are not usually relying on hosting providers and their versions but instead run their own servers. This frees the team to focus on the PHP version (and other dependencies) that work best with our framework. Midgard core developer Piotras has estimated that some Midgard functionalities like Query Builder will be substantially faster on PHP 5. Secondly, the PHP part of Midgard is MidCOM - a quite large object-oriented component framework. While MidCOM has been possible to develop on PHP4, new OOP features in PHP 5 will make the code much easier to develop and understand. Finally, Midgard 2 will be out soon, and Henri wants to ensure there is a Midgard 1 series release requiring PHP 5 release earlier, just to be sure.

For the uninitated, Midgard CMS is an Open Source Content Management System built on top of the Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) platform. It provides a reliable, powerful and internationalized set of tools for building web sites and networked applications. Midgard utilizes PHP as the web scripting language and provides integration interfaces on Java and C layers. Midgard's unique architecture enables it to provide services like single sign-on and replication. With these capabilities and the integrated full-text search system, Midgard is an excellent match for information-rich web sites and intranets.