PHP Version
 

I am contemplating working on a fairly major add-on that I would like to share with the vBulletin community. Since the project is going to involve quite a bit of work with XML, I'd like to take advantage of some of the new extensions that are available in PHP5, but I'm curious how many people would be able to use it, if I did. So, I'd like to run a poll to get a rough gauge of the utilization.

What version of PHP does your server use? If you are using version 4.x, is it conceivable that you could upgrade if there was a hack you wanted to use that required it?

Just write it using the XML functions in PHP5 (I assume you mean SimpleXML. Love SimpleXML), if people can't be bothered to do a painless upgrade or find a host that's current to the times then so be it. I've stopped writing in anything but PHP5-required code.

vBulletin has its own XML parsing (read/write) class. They aren't nearly as good as the built-in stuff, but they work.

I think there are quite a few hosts which only offer PHP 4. It's probably a good idea to keep your requirements the same as vBulletin's, if possible.

I love SimpleXML as well. It is very easy to use, and the object oriented modeling makes it a cinch. I am also considering XMLReader from PHP5, due to its very low memory usage, although it is not nearly as easy to use as SimpleXML.