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The Gallery team has announced that it is joining GoPHP5.net to help propagate the spread of PHP5

This announcement means that all Gallery 2 released after February 5th, 2008 will support PHP5.2 or newer, and older PHP 4.x versions will no longer be supported.

Gallery 2.3 is currently in development, and this will most likely be the last Gallery 2 version with legacy PHP 4.3 support. The Gallery team is committed to support it and any security issues discovered for at least six months after the first PHP 5.2 only release.

Perhaps this answers Gregory Szorc's "So Many Untapped PHP Features" posting where the following was posted:

Gallery, another commonly used PHP application also fails to fully utilize PHP, although they are more graceful about it. Gallery 2 uses classes for almost everything. Like Drupal, I love their design philosophy of separating features into modules. Unlike Drupal, they take the proper approach and contain similar functionality in classes. Sadly, there are no PHP 5 visibility keywords on class variables and functions, but at least their naming convention distinguishes between public and non-public.

The plain and simple reason why the Gallery 2 code base doesn't adopt PHP5 only features, yet, has been that PHP5 adaptation as been to low, but the team has now decided to push forward and hopefully help speed things up a bit. (For a more detailed explanation, read Bharat Medirattas comment on the same post)

Several other claims made in the same posting by Gregory does not apply though, like

Now, it is very easy to point to low PHP 5 adoption on servers and take sides with application developers for sticking with PHP 4. But I think there is more to it than just that. After all, if gven a compelling reason to upgrade, you'll do it, right? (Sadly, security is not compelling enough to many running PHP 4. Oh well.)

Very few of the Gallery2 users are able to upgrade PHP on their own. Most of them buy hosting space somewhere, and the responsibility for upgrading PHP does, in most cases, not fall on the end user of the service. If everyone hosted their own sites, most of them would be on PHP5 a very long time ago.

I believe the biggest problem hindering PHP 5 adoption is ignorance. The average PHP "programmer" is ignorant of the features available in PHP. Because the PHP syntax is easy for new programmers to read (at least compared to Perl, C, and arguably Python (note to self, learn more Python) ) and because the barrier to entry for PHP is low...

Claiming that developing for the least common denominator is ignorant, is in fact ignorant in itself.

In some cases it might be due to ignorance and/or lack of better knowledge, but I can personally guarantee that this is not the case when it comes to Gallery. Of course, if you started fresh and decided to utilize PHP 5 features from the get go, you could do that, You would, however, greatly limit your possible market share considerably, so it's a decision that needs to be taken with great care. The Habari project decided to go with PHP5 only from the start, and I commend them for it.

Other big projects has already joined the GoPHP5 program, like Drupal, phpMyAdmin and Typo3, lets all hope this will help speeding up the PHP5 implementation rate, especially in hosted environments.

Hosting companies are key here, please contact your hosting company and inform them of the GoPHP5 initiative and ask them when PHP5 will be available. You, the user, need it.