A website has been launched by the collaboration of several major web Open Source projects. This website, GoPHP5.org, has been launched to promote a mass switch-over from PHP4 to PHP5. The reason for this is so that the PHP.net team can drop support for PHP4 and focus on PHP6. Here's a quote from their site.
The PHP development team, of course, can't drop maintenance support for PHP 4 while most web hosts still run PHP 4.
It is a dangerous cycle, and one that needs to be broken. The PHP developer community has decided that it is indeed now time to move forward, together. Therefore, the listed software projects have all agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, any new feature releases will have a minimum version requirement of at least PHP 5.2.0. Furthermore, the listed web hosts have agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, they will include PHP 5.2 (or a more recent version) in their service offer.
The initial response they've had is great with many projects and web hosts signing up saying that they will make the switch over before Febryary 5th 2008 - I hope my webhost (Xcalibre) do too. There's just under 211 days to go... make sure you're ready.
If you do run an Open Source project, or are a web host, then you can go to their site and sign up to show your support and readiness (also I guess it's a bit of extra advertising!).
Link: GoPHP5.org
We are already supporting PHP 5 on some servers, and I'd be surprised if we have not migrated completely to 5.2 by Feb of 2008.
Tony Lucas (XCalibre)