Jhong wrote:Go PHP5 sounds like a good idea. I don't think PMA will die if it doesn't catch on -- hosts will just use older versions until a cool new feature piques their interest, it's no big deal.
And for the styles team: Stop supporting IE6.
Stop bothering to check whether standards-compliant CSS renders properly in IE6.
Backward-compatibility is good, but you really have to examine the costs/benefit.
Hmm...
Jhong wrote:Stop supporting IE6.
I think this part shows that this person is just kidding with everything he has said.
Jhong wrote:
This is a non-techie site, with a good cross-section of people. (I mention the nature of the site to prove it is so).
I would suggest your site is visited by people more on the techie side. In comparison my stats would be the complete opposite and is a site that your average homeowner is more inclined to visit, IE7 is about 60% , IE6 about 20%. FF and the rest fill out the other 20%. Those are probably the type of stats you're going to see on most sites with the exception of FF having a slightly higher presence.
Edit: Just looked at the public stats on a very popular video forum I visit frequently where your average user is inclined to be on the technical side. IE60% , FF30%. No distinction on there between IE versions.
“Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I have found several thousand things that won’t work.”
On my own site, visited by the more technically inclined, Firefox takes the cake at 65%, with IE at 28%, and various other browsers falling behind that. Out of the IE, IE7 is 57%, IE6 is 42%, and a couple of IE5 and 4. IE6 may be pretty sorry when it comes to supporting things, but I cannot afford to alienate that many users. I'd guess most other sites can't either. On another site, IE6 takes the lead with 51% and IE7 just behind at 48% out of a total of 42% for IE and 48% for Firefox. It really is not worth it to alienate users just because you think it is time to move on.
Here is the bottom line as I see it: It all comes down to a choice.
You have the choice to try to support IE(x) or not.
Your users have the choice to use IE(x) or not.
Your potential users will opt to use your site or not, depending on how the site works for them.
If you are willing to lose even 5% of your potential customers, that's your decision. I didn't particularly like prosilver's support for IE6 at the beginning, but there was always subsilver2. And they have made a number of "fixes" along the way that helped.
I blog about phpBB: phpBBDoctor blog
Still using phpbb2? So am I! Click below for details
I take the opinion that IE7 is a security update and should replace IE6 as fast as possible IMO.
However I recognise that IE6 still has a large marketshare, and do not wish to alienate users of the browser because I get up on a political whim one day. This is the real world, not everything is perfect, and as engineers we have to deal with the deal world, not some magical land where everything is perfect.
This too extends to PHP support. If you can support PHP4 easily, then why not? phpBB3s bottom line is based on what we need to the exact point release, not some magical marker where the script may work below, we're just not going to be bothered with it.
smithy_dll wrote:I take the opinion that IE7 is a security update and should replace IE6 as fast as possible IMO.
Not all of us can switch from IE6 to IE7. There are alot of people, like me, who still use versions of Windows older than XP, particularly Windows 2000. Also, don't forget, Microsoft is still making security updates for IE6, although I have a hunch that will probably stop when the extended support period for WIndows 2000 ends (some time in 2008)..
I really hope phpBB puts some serious thought into joining this movement. It would help it a lot and be a step forward for later versions of phpBB.
Also, it's naive to think that this is "the end of PHPmyadmin". Let's say some people decide to make a fork (which I'm sure has been done a TON of times before) to work with php 4. Who is going to use it? People who like using inferior software? Does anyone honestly believe that people who have been using phpmyadmin for years are going to switch to some fork? Of course they aren't. People who use phpmyadmin are going to stick with phpmyadmin and that's why it's so powerful that they joined.
cooleo100d wrote: Does anyone honestly believe that people who have been using phpmyadmin for years are going to switch to some fork? Of course they aren't.
I would think that depends on what hardships they are going to encounter. This discussions has a lot of parallels with upgrading to Vista, if you have 10 applications unsupported on Vista that you use frequently on XP are you going to upgrade to Vista just for one application that is available only on Vista? Most likely not and I think the same would be true for phpmyadmin .
“Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I have found several thousand things that won’t work.”
It says there will still be security patches until 2008-08-08, so it's not dead for quite a while yet. The announcement essentially puts it on the same "no new features by security updates where necesary" ground that phpBB2.0 has existed at for the last couple of years.
There will be alot of enterprise webservers that will not upgrade very fast because taking the server out means a loss of alot of revenue, and proper testing and deployment will be required. Especially those with large server farms. PHP4 will live on for some time, much as PHP3 before it did, and phpBB2.0 supported PHP3 for a long time.
Things will change at their own pace as they need to.
Comparing ZF/insert framework here to phpBB is an apples and oranges debate ... They have nothing to do with one another.
I quite like ZF, but that's in a slightly different position from phpBB. For starters, they built for PHP5 from the beginning, whilst phpBB was built for PHP3 from the beginning. That's a huge difference. phpBB has since dropped PHP3 support (ironically a fix to a security flaw caused by PHP), but still openly supports PHP4, and will continue to do so until it is no longer a viable option. Right now, there is no reason not to support PHP4. It works, people still use it (wrongly or not, we have a userbase to support), and phpBB's features work just fine.
On the job, I am stuck with IE6. 
