A little over three years ago, the PHP community released version 5 of its popular programming language. PHP5 has now become the version of choice for many new PHP projects. However, PHP4 remains popular and is still widely used.

The PHP community has announced that December 2007 will be the end of life for PHP4. While this may sound ominous, it doesn’t mean that PHP4 will simply vanish. But it does mean that the PHP community will stop maintaining PHP4.

If you operate an osCommerce store that has not been fully upgraded in the last year or so then it's quite likely you will be affected when hosting companies insist on using PHP5 (Older versions of osCommerce that were developed for PHP4 will probably stop working unless they have been made PHP5 compliant)