osCommerce PHP 5.2 Upgrade - You Really Should Get onto PHP 5.3 ASAP

Many of our clients use osCommerce for their online store. osCommerce was very popular a few years ago and to date still powers a really large number of stores. Due to a variety of technical reasons, many osCommerce stores are still hosting on PHP version 5.2.

The latest version of PHP is 5.4 and 5.5 is due out fairly soon. Most hosting companies will now regard PHP 5.3 to be the minimum version they will support. By switching to PHP 5.3 they get better performance and better security. Unfortunately if you are running an osCommerce store and your hosting company decides to upgrade PHP then you might find that your entire store stops working.

The first instinct here is to get your store back online as quickly as possible and that is entirely understandable. These days though we really think that osCommerce store owners should be running on PHP 5.3. It is entirely possible to do this and does not necessarily entail a large amount of work depending on which contributions you are running.

The last release for PHP 5.2 was version 5.2.16 released back in 2010. In software terms that is really quite a long time ago and really underlines how much of an issue this is.

You can read about some of the performance gains of switching to PHP 5.3 or greater on this page.

If you would like some help getting your osCommerce store working on an up to date version of PHP then get in touch with Edmonds Commerce today.

Of course another option is to think about moving away from osCommerce and onto a more up to date platform such as osCommerce or OpenCart. If you are thinking of ugprading then 5.3 compatability will be a bonus. If you are not thinking of upgrading platform any time soon though you really do need to schedule in an upgrade to PHP 5.3 at the earliest opportunity.