Recently I had released a WordPress plugin - Google Blog Search Preview. I had tested it over two webhosting providers and everything seemed perfect. But within a week of release, I was getting reports of this plugin failing on certain installations. Well, it turns out that I had coded my plugins in PHP5.

The error was,

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STATIC, expecting T_OLD_FUNCTION or T_FUNCTION or T_VAR or ‘}’ in /home/brodopr/public_html/brodo/wp-content/plugins/jj_gblogsearch.php on line 15

Unfortunately many sites still run WordPress on PHP4. The biggest problem is that object oriented features in PHP is very different between version 4 and 5. For example, the static keyword is not available in PHP 4 which I was using in my plugins!

So the first lesson in WordPress plugin development - Test your plugins in both PHP 4 and PHP 5 installations! WAMP server even has a plugin which allows you to switch between PHP4 and PHP5. So that was easy!

I have released version 1.1 of Google Blog Search Preview  which works on PHP4 and PHP5. You can download it here. Many thanks to Carlo and Len for reporting this problem.