As you may have seen, August 8, 2008 saw the release of PHP 4.4.9, the last version of PHP 4, ever. In other words, support for PHP 4 by the PHP developers has now officially ended.

For those of you still running your site on PHP 4, now would be a good time to start looking into upgrading to PHP 5. Check with your hosting service.

What does this mean for Geeklog? While there is no immediate pressure to drop support for PHP 4, it would certainly make our lives a bit easier. There will be a bugfix release for Geeklog 1.5.0 with the exact same minimal requirements as 1.5.0 (i.e. PHP 4.1.0). After that, we will start integrating the results of this year's Summer of Code - and we may very well raise the minimum requirements a bit for that release.

But by how much? Let's have a poll to find out what you are running on.

In the unlikely event that you missed it (and since the announcement is about to drop from the home page): We finally released Geeklog 1.5.0 last week.

Since then, the demo site has also been upgraded to 1.5.0 and Ironmax and others are busy updating the themes. Great work. Thanks a lot, guys!

Also, we hope you've noticed a slight performance improvement on www.geeklog.net. This is not due to 1.5.0, though, but our friendly hosting service and sponsor, pair Networks, who upgraded and switched our two servers around so that now the faster of the two is powering geeklog.net.

I'd also like to announce that Geeklog will have a booth at this year's FrOSCon, a very fine open source conference to be held on August 23 + 24, 2008 in Sankt Augustin, Germany. This date coincides with the end of this year's Summer of Code so that we should be able to show off some of our student's accomplishments by then. We hope to see some of you there!

So while we're busy reviewing the student applications for the Summer of Code, here's a quick update on the status of the next Geeklog release, 1.5:

The plan is to release Geeklog 1.5 (which includes the results of last year's GSoC) in time for the start of the coding phase of this year's Summer of Code. In other words, before May 26th.

Things are looking good so far. There are still some bugs and kinks to be worked out (e.g. support for MS SQL is currently broken), but there is already one site out there running on 1.5.

And in related news, our bugtracker, which was missing in action for over a year now, is tentatively back.