As you may know, PHP4 is going to be discontinued by their developers by the end of 2007. You can read more about this important decision here and here.
We are now improving and updating our product source codes to get benefit of PHP5 functionalities. This will result with several incompatibilities with PHP4 environments. Unfortunately, the new benefits of PHP5 can not be used without dropping the PHP4 support.
We strongly recommend you to upgrade your web server PHP version from 4 to 5. Otherwise, you will have an unsupported PHP4 version in just a few months which may cause several security and script incompatibility issues.
To learn your PHP version, simply create a test PHP script and write the following PHP code inside that file:
<?php
phpinfo();
?>
Save and upload this file to your web server and run it through your web browser. If your PHP version is older than v5, we strongly recommend you to contact your hosting company and learn how to upgrade your PHP version.
The new Oempro version which is going to be released in just a few weeks will be PHP5 compatible and will not support PHP4. We are implementing special improvements in Oempro’s send engine modules and this action requires PHP5.
For your questions and comments, do not hesitate to contact us via sales@octeth.com
Great news!
Looking forward to the PHP5 improvements. I’m guessing this means Swift Mailer is finally being implemented?
Hi Joe,
Exactly! In fact we almost completed the new sendengine with swiftmailer. Testing it, it may take a few weeks more but it’s on the way.
Take care.
I think this is a bad idea that will cost Octeth sales. Not everyone cares about being with the latest technology or uses programs that require it and most shared or even VPS accounts are currently using PHP 4.x which means a special request to support to upgrade. For people whose sites are working just fine as is, that’s a major hassle required only by your software. Why bother when there are alternatives that don’t require it. Or perhaps existing customers will just decide to stick with an old version of oempro instead of paying for an upgrade.
At the least, you should do some basic market research. You could start with a simple poll on your forums page. Even better would be a survey on your homepage.
FWIW, I personally will stick with one of your older versions until there is at least one other compelling reason to upgrade my PHP installation.
I guess the basic question for you as a company is: are the new functions provided by PHP 5 worth the possible loss of sales?
Hello Joey,
Thanks for your kind suggestion. However, upgrading your PHP from v4 to v5 is not following the latest technology. It’s a mandatory upgrade because PHPv4 is not going to be supported any more. This means that security patches, bug fixes and similar upgrades will not be released any more for PHP4.
We decided to continue with PHP5 because it provides more opportunities and this is a must-have in todays world. With PHP5, we can make Oempro’s send engine even faster, we can make it more organized and more object oriented. This means less maintenance cost which means faster upgrade releases.
In 2008, most of hosting companies will complete upgrading their PHP version to the latest one, PHP5.
Currently, Oempro works without any issue on both PHP4 and PHP5 but the coming update will be compatible with only PHP5 because there are major improvements on send engine.
We don’t believe that there will be a markable loss of sales because based on our market research, most of hosting companies already completed their PHP5 upgrade. And others are planning to complete the upgrade process in 6 months which is quite acceptable for us.
PHP5 provides more opportunities to us. This means more features, better features, faster features to the end user.
Take care.