WordPress is one of the most popular blog hosting platforms in the world, but it’s also one of the most popular pieces of open-source software. From small-times bloggers to some of the biggest sites out there, WordPress is a widely used choice. So any changes are bound to affect a lot of people. WordPress is now announcing, almost a year ahead of time, that future versions of the software, specifically WordPress 3.2, will be dropping support for PHP 4 and MySQL 4.

“We want users to have flexibility when choosing a host for their precious content. Because of this strategy, WordPress runs pretty much anywhere. Web hosting platforms, however, change over time, and we occasionally are able to reevaluate some of the requirements for running WordPress. Now is one of those times. You probably guessed it from the title — we’re finally ready to announce the end of support for PHP 4 and MySQL 4!,” WordPress announced.

WordPress 3.1 isn’t due until late this year and WordPress 3.2 is tentatively scheduled to land in the first half of 2011, so there’s plenty of notice for users to update their configurations or hosts.

Come WordPress 3.2, the oldest version of PHP supported will be 5.2. The developers say this version is popular and widespread enough so that the change won’t affect the majority of users. In fact, less than 11 percent of users are still running a version below PHP 5.2. This number is expected to drop even further by the time of the switch and the fact that both Joomla and Drupal are dropping support soon as well should accelerate the upgrade rate.

Also with WordPress 3.2, there will be no more support for MySQL 4 and the minimum requirement will be MySQL 5.0.15. Just six percent of WordPress installs still use anything below that.

WordPress 3.0 is available for download here on Softpedia.