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Why have the PHP teams got three different stable versions of PHP on the go? These are: 5.6, 5.5, 5.4, and they've just recently released version 7 alpha.

Could someone enlighten me as to why the PHP group decided that three different stable versions of PHP is good idea? And might I assume that I best just jump straight into 5.7 and clean up my code?

I don't think my requirements are exotic - I don't crunch data, I just use PHP validated data to read/write to MySQL - no rocket science.

The issue? My old WAMP Zend v6 Community Edition run's PHP 5.5.7 and my new AWS micro machine uses 5.3.29 (build date May 2015 but amazingly, AWS have standardized on the pre-historic 5.3). I discovered a bug with json_encode(). When I realised I have two different versions of PHP, I'm thinking its best I just upgrade both to similar versions. Hence I am thinking 5.7 is probably my best bet for future support. Comments welcome.

halfer
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    because there's enough users of the "old" versions that can't (or won't) upgrade to newer versions due to deprecrated/removed features. in other words, you might as well ask Microsoft why they supported XP for so long when Vista and 7 were also available. – Marc B Jun 29 '15 at 20:41
  • @cmorrissey Okay - that makes sense... Thanks for prompt reply. –  Jun 29 '15 at 20:46
  • Because they decided a while back on rules for maintaining support of older versions that didn't entail having to support 10 or 15 or 20 different versions - http://php.net/supported-versions.php - but PHP 5.4 is security patches only now (and only for another 2 months before it's no longer supported at all), PHP 5.5 will become security patches only in just a few more days, and PHP 5.7 will never exist – Mark Baker Jun 29 '15 at 21:01
  • one reason is what Marc B said, the other reason why they do this is to correct their mistakes in previous versions,for example let's take a look to CSS.CSS2 was not fully implemented in browsers so that led the CSS team to create new versions: CSS 2.1 and CSS3.same happened with HTML.HTML2.0(released in 1995)was Not **forward** looking at all!Followed by that, HTML 3.2, Web Standard Project, HTML 4.0, XHTML and so on were released. – marc_s Jun 29 '15 at 21:10
  • @MarkB you say PHP 5.7 will never exist, true - I meant to say 5.6... I was going to point out your typo, but instead found my own. Thanks =) I guess I will standardize on 5.6 –  Jun 30 '15 at 10:36

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The older versions are less supported than the newer versions however the older versions exist because of their popularity within present day production.