I'm creating my self hosted environment on 1&1 and I have an option of selecting php 5.2 or 5.4 I see that others have posted they are using 5.3 Am I ok to us 5.4? or should I be safe and use 5.2?

Hey @sxywebgirl, Not 100 percent but I believe it's fine. LA

Keep in mind how software is (supposed to be) numbered. X.X.x Major revision, Minor revision, Bug Fix. So, 5.x.x should be applicable across the board. 5.3 is a minor revision from 5.2, and 5.4 is a minor revision from 5.3 Granted, 'sometimes' this isn't true, but most of the time it is. Cheers! -- Smug

@LA, I was thinking it would be ok, but wanted to double check. SmugWimp said most 5.x versions should be ok. Thanks

Php 5.2 won't work for push notifications in Android. So I would suggest going with php 5.4

Have a look at the following document: <a href="http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/dsl/lerdorf-php54-1564639.html" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/dsl/lerdorf-php54-1564639.html</a> It is written by the guy who develops PHP from 1995, Rasmus Lerdorf. What is of intereset to your question is the following list of things that are excluded from 5.4: ================================ Removed Features We finally pulled the trigger on a number of features that have been marked as deprecated for years. These include allow_call_time_pass_reference, define_syslog_variables, highlight.bg, register_globals, register_long_arrays, magic_quotes, safe_mode, zend.ze1_compatibility_mode, session.bug_compat42, session.bug_compat_warn and y2k_compliance. Out of these magic_quotes is probably the biggest risk. Despite all the things that are wrong with magic_quotes, naively-written applications that don’t do anything to protect themselves from SQL injection are protected by magic_quotes in previous versions. Upgrading to PHP 5.4 without verifying that proper SQLi-protection measures have been taken could lead to security vulnerabilities. ================================ So, if the self hosted version of BuzzTouch is using any of the now missing functions in ver 5.4, you are in trouble. (I haven't had a look at the source code to see whether it does or not.) So yeah, installing 5.2 is probably better your your purposes. @smug Another quote from this document: ============================= After the release of PHP 5.0 in 2004, 5.1 followed in 2005 with the new DateTime implementation, PDO, and performance improvements. PHP 5.2 came in 2006 and brought an improved memory manager, JSON support, and input filtering. At that point we started the push to PHP 6, which was a super-ambitious plan to completely rewrite everything around the ICU (International Components for Unicode) library. It turned out to be a little too ambitious - we couldn't get enough developers excited about it, and instead ended up rolling all the various features that had been sitting around waiting for PHP 6 into a PHP 5.3 release in 2009. This 3-year gap between 5.2 and 5.3 also meant that 5.3 brought a lot of new things to PHP: namespaces, late static binding, closures, garbage collection, restricted goto, mysqlnd (MySQL native driver), much better Windows performance, and many other things. In hindsight, it probably would have made sense to call this release PHP 6, but PHP 6 had become synonymous with the Unicode effort to the point that books had even been written about it, so we didn't feel we could release PHP 6 without a major push toward Unicode. We did introduce an ICU extension called “intl” that also compiles against PHP 5.2, which gives you access to much of ICU's functionality. The mbstring extension has improved steadily over time, which means that pretty much any Unicode-related problem has a solution, it just isn't cleanly integrated into the language itself. This brings us to the PHP 5.4 release in 2012. Again, an almost 3-year gap between releases, which is something we want to improve upon. I would like to get back to annual releases with fewer new features in each. =============================

Great info, Dusko! Thanks. -- Niraj

Nice Info but if you want to sent push notifications to Android devices then 5.2 will give error as the functions used in the buzztouch code are not present in php 5.2 or earlier versions. For example json_last_error

@Rishav, I will need to send push notifications to both iOS and Android devices. @Dusko, Thanks for the great info! Unfortunately, I dont know much about php and knowing how to verify that proper SQLi-protection measures have been taken would be beyond my knowledge. Hmmm what to do, what to do.... I guess I need to find directions on how to verify proper SQLi-protection.