zlacker

Distributions like Debian maintain their own LTS versions of PHP for many more years than the PHP people themselves, backporting applicable security fixes as necessary.

>>nerdbe+(OP)
I run a lot of WP sites on Debian for exactly this reason. Every now and then there's a feature that's unavailable though because someone's written something (usually in a plugin) for a bleeding edge version of PHP.

I think official LTS for PHP would still help, if only to drive a few of the larger developers to target those versions to ensure maximum ease of deployment and maintenance.