Wordpress to end support for PHP 4?

Question

Recently getting into wordpress plugin development, I started to investigate how to make my code backward compatible to php 4+. I've focused only on php 5.1+ for the past 5 years, so this was an ordeal.

Anyway, when looking at some plugins, one of them had this description:

IMPORTANT: This plugin is not compatible with PHP 4. If you try to install it on a host running PHP 4, you will get a parse error. WordPress is ending support for PHP 4 as of version 3.2

Is it true that wordpress is going to stop supporting php prior to php 5?

Answer 1

Yes, version 3.1 is the last version to support PHP 4.

For WordPress 3.2, due in the first half of 2011, we will be raising the minimum required PHP version to 5.2. Why 5.2? Because that’s what the vast majority of WordPress users are using, and it offers substantial improvements over earlier PHP 5 releases. It is also the minimum PHP version that the Drupal and Joomla projects will be supporting in their next versions, both due out this year.

Based on that announcement page, I'd actually expect 3.2 to be released a little later this year (i.e. early Q3), since 3.1 ended up a few months later than that page projected (not a knock on the dev team, FYI - just conjecture on my part).

Answer 2

This is true. See the announcement here.