Frans van der Meer

Although in my head the community is like a dolphin, it actually is a whale.

I remember it well; Last summer, I got, to celebrate the birthday of my son, a brand new shiny PHP. It was the long waited release PHP 5.3. Great work from the community and the guys @Zend. Man, was I happy. Quicker, namespaces and better implementation of classes; WHOHOO (yes i know… it is nerdy). In general a great release and a big step towards PHP6. O.K. it breaks some old code, or give you warnings about deprecated functions, but nothing you cannot fix.

A lot of PHP-based community projects were quick in resolving the new issues for PHP 5.3. So, great news… yes!.. but not. Most projects have a community ecosystem with contributed modules or plug-ins. Here lies the problem. You can build a site with a vanilla WordPress or Drupal, but the real power is in the thousands of modules, widgets and plug ins written on attics by teenagers without friends (or by professional web developers). You want quick and easy a photo gallery in your blog? no problem install this and that and there you go.

Those contrib modules sometimes become so important, that you cannot live without them. What is a Drupal site without imagecache, or a WordPress site without Google XML Sitemaps? It even gets worse because other modules start to depend on API modules… building a huge tree of dependencies.
It is quite normal that a module has a development cycle of 3 months. Most modules are developed in spare time or were needed for a project and there is no reason to actively maintain the module by the coder. So perfectly normal and easy to understand that things take time. If you are a brave citizen you send your improvements and fixes to the maintainer who then can use or ignore it.

A couple of weeks a go i installed the new Ubuntu 10.04 (alpha) on my laptop. 10.04 is not released yet, but it is fun to test it and break stuff. I use my laptop to develop PHP code and use a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) install on my laptop to test  code. Ubuntu 10.04 comes with PHP 5.3 as default. Not a real problem nearly a year after the release of 5.3… I thought.

Drupal, WordPress and Joomla! are useless in PHP 5.3. Yes you can use the core of those projects, Yes a lot of modules are 5.3 compatible, but there are more modules with big warnings in 5.3, making your whole site unusable. So you start fixing, coding and searching in issue queues (is this bug already spotted?) and almost all bugs are in issue queues, including a patch that fix it. Why are those modules not patched yet in a official release? Of course, a lot of good reasons… No time, The patch breaks more then it fixes, Not urgent enough.

I downgraded PHP 5.3 to PHP 5.2 on my shiny new Ubuntu 10.04 and thus ignored the bugs for now, it is just too much. In a month the official release of Ubuntu will be here; This means that from then on, our servers will be shipped with PHP 5.3, breaking a lot of PHP sites. I think we need to stay on 8.04 for the servers for a while

Off course, it will all be fixed… nothing beats the community… i know. It is just that I sometimes want a strong community dictator.. “Fix it! or else…”