As of today, PHP 5.3 has reached "end of life" status with the release of version 5.3.29 which means that the PHP community will no longer bring out any updates and wants everybody to move to either version 5.4 or - even better - 5.5. This also means no more bugs and/or security issues will get fixed.

Therefore we have decided to move on with Podlove Publisher and require PHP 5.4 starting with the next major release (2.0) which might be ready in a few weeks from now. This also allows us to use some nice new language features in 5.4 for upcoming features of the Publisher.

We know that there are quite a few web hosters out there who neither care much about security nor regular feature upgrades. Locked in a "legacy world", these companies do not provide timely updates and are unable to provide you with a modern foundation for your web applications. Just to be clear: PHP 5.3 is now FIVE YEARS OLD. On the Internet, this means ancient. If your hosting company can't help you, leave them asap as they are not worthy of the name "host".

Even the initial release of PHP 5.4 is now two and a half years ago and that version will be phased out in a year from now (as it stands today, March 2015). Expect us to require PHP 5.5 then and we will probably continue to dump outdated versions quickly in the future.

Podlove Publisher 2 will also be a change in how we orchestrate and choose version numbers. Don't expect version 2 to be a huge change: it's going to be as incremental as recent releases in the 1.x chain have been. But we are going to drop the "alpha" in the version string once and for all as for sure have left the alpha stage and are even beyond beta right now.

Major release number will then increase more often than before, denoting significant feature upgrades while "x.y" releases will be more about a reorganisation of these features and "x.y.z" releases mostly about bug fixes.

Finally, we'd like to encourage you to upgrade often. We know we didn't manage to make the upgrade process flawless in all cases but we have always responded as fast as we can when things were messed up. We think everyone who has asked for help using GitHub issues can tell that we care a lot about system stability and compatibility and try to be as responsive as possible. Please use this path for any bug reports and feature requests. It really helps.