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Just anecdata. My SO is currently working for a very small regional dairy producer (think 18 people total). Naturally they have a website no one really knows ho

Just anecdata. My SO is currently working for a very small regional dairy producer (think 18 people total). Naturally they have a website no one really knows how to handle. My SO needed to update stuff, received the login info and the first thing we saw was WordPress stating that php5.6 is too old and should be updated. After some arguing with the company that is payed to manage their IT environment she got them to finally update the php version and now the server is running 8.1. I was glad that at least wp was up to date. Current wp running on quite old php version and exactly nothing broke with the update. I was positively surprised. Would have expected more problems from my experience with other projects in other languages.

yurishimo 5y ago
The WordPress core team does a great job of updating to support new PHP versions as soon as betas are released. Hell, in the most recent version, they even patched in some of the new PHP8.1 functions so they can be used before the official release. We all know the tech is out of date at its core, but I don’t think it’s fair when people say they’re holding PHP back when there is an active effort to keep things compatible.
- francislavoie 5y ago
  It's holding PHP back in the sense that because there's so many WordPress installations out there running on old versions of PHP and old versions of WordPress, that _will_ have to update at some point, it means that PHP internal devs need to always consider how any breaking change they make would affect those users. In general, the WordPress community is _slow_ and plugin authors and users definitely do not keep up at the same pace at the rest of the community using more modern frameworks. They tend to have written worse code in general, which are proportionately more impacted by deprecations and error promotions where the code wasn't using best practices. The PHP internals maintainers hear complaints from people in the WordPress space saying "whoa you're making too many breaking changes too fast, I can't keep up", meanwhile having the developers of modern frameworks getting impatient, wanting all the new features to save them time in writing new code. If PHP didn't have all these legacy projects still in use, deprecations/strictness changes could move at a faster pace.

yurishimo 5y ago

The WordPress core team does a great job of updating to support new PHP versions as soon as betas are released. Hell, in the most recent version, they even patched in some of the new PHP8.1 functions so they can be used before the official release. We all know the tech is out of date at its core, but I don’t think it’s fair when people say they’re holding PHP back when there is an active effort to keep things compatible.

francislavoie 5y ago
It's holding PHP back in the sense that because there's so many WordPress installations out there running on old versions of PHP and old versions of WordPress, that _will_ have to update at some point, it means that PHP internal devs need to always consider how any breaking change they make would affect those users. In general, the WordPress community is _slow_ and plugin authors and users definitely do not keep up at the same pace at the rest of the community using more modern frameworks. They tend to have written worse code in general, which are proportionately more impacted by deprecations and error promotions where the code wasn't using best practices. The PHP internals maintainers hear complaints from people in the WordPress space saying "whoa you're making too many breaking changes too fast, I can't keep up", meanwhile having the developers of modern frameworks getting impatient, wanting all the new features to save them time in writing new code. If PHP didn't have all these legacy projects still in use, deprecations/strictness changes could move at a faster pace.