The following is a guest post by Chris Van Patten, founder of Tomodomo, a digital agency for magazine publishers. For years, WordPress has been ever-so-slightly behind the times on PHP version support…to put it kindly. However, WordPress’ legendary support for PHP versions back to 5.2 — versions long unsupported by the PHP project itself —…
![php[world] 2018 to Feature Full-Day Gutenberg Development Workshop](https://wptavern.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/phpworld-2018.png)
The fourth annual php[world] conference is just two weeks away. The event is dedicated to uniting the PHP community and will be held November 14-15, 2018, in Washington, D.C. This year the organizing team created a “Content Advisory Board” to ensure the event included sessions that will appeal to everyone. The board includes two WordPress…
The plans for WordPress 4.9.9 are currently in limbo after today’s core developers’ chat. Here’s what we know right now: Discussions are underway regarding making it a quick PHP 7.3 compatibility release or cancelling it in favor of moving ahead with the 5.0 release cycle. “Progress and communication on 4.9.9 has been very vague as…
In this episode, John James Jacoby and I discuss the news of the week including, the removal of offensive lyrics in Hello Dolly, a request for plugin developers to stop supporting legacy PHP versions, and changes coming in WordPress 4.9.5. We also talk about community management, the difference between comments and forums, and finally, John…
Iain Poulson has published a thoughtful request on the Delicious Brains blog asking WordPress plugin developers to stop supporting legacy PHP versions. He covers some of the benefits of developing with newer versions of PHP, what Delicious Brains is doing with its plugins, and using the Requires Minimum PHP Version header in readme.txt. While we…
Although WordPress core currently maintains backwards compatibility with PHP 5.2.4+, plugin and theme authors are not required to do so. When developers include features that require more recent versions of PHP, it can break sites or cause otherwise unexpected behavior. As part of a larger effort to encourage users to upgrade their PHP versions, WordPress.org…
WordPress’ Core PHP team has created a new GitHub organization for initiatives focused on improving the use of PHP in the project. The first one they are tackling is a new page on WordPress.org dedicated to educating users about the benefits of upgrading PHP. Contributors are collecting third-party articles and tutorials on PHP upgrades to…
Inpsyde, a WordPress agency and WordPress.com VIP partner based in Germany, has open sourced Wonolog, a package that integrates Monolog for sophisticated WordPress data logging. Monolog is the most widely used PHP logging library with more than 57 million downloads to date. Wonolog automatically creates logs that target specific WordPress requests and can be customized…
The results of the BuddyPress 2016 survey have been published. This year the survey received feedback from 302 respondents in 61 different countries, a 43% increase in responses from 2015. The top five countries represented in the survey include the United States (27.15%), India (7.62%), United Kingdom (6.95%), Germany (6.29%), and Canada (3.64%). English remains…
PHP 5.6 usage has steadily increased over the past year and has now overtaken versions 5.3 and 5.4 to be the most widely used version, according to W3Techs’ stats. PHP is used by 82.6% of all the websites for which W3Techs can detect a server-side programming language. PHP 7 accounts for 3.1% of these websites…
PHP 7 Release Manager and Core Developer Kalle Sommer Nielsen has been watching the usage statistics of the latest version rise on W3Techs’ market share assessment. PHP is currently used by 82.1% of all the websites for which W3Techs can detect a server-side programming language. The site also collects data on the breakdown of major…
BuddyPress lead developers have decided to bump the minimum PHP requirement for version 2.8 of the plugin to 5.3+. The new guidelines for BuddyPress’ PHP version support, authored by Boone Gorges on behalf of the team, states that the plugin will offer full support for all stable versions of PHP officially supported by the PHP…
PHP 4 style constructors are being deprecated in WordPress 4.3 to ease the transition to support PHP 7. According to Aaron Jorbin, on the Make WordPress Core blog post, WordPress r32990 introduces a change so that all classes use the PHP 5 style constructors, while still retaining the PHP 4 style constructors for backwards compatibility. A…
Developers are anxious for WordPress to bump up the minimum PHP requirement for core, as it’s currently lingering at 5.2, which is no longer among the supported versions of PHP. As of August 2014, PHP 5.3 no longer receives patches for security vulnerabilities. Recent updates to WordPress.org stats indicate that 16.4% of WordPress sites are…
In March of 2013, Matt Mullenweg stopped by the Memeburn office to talk about how WordPress went from being just another blogging platform to becoming the CMS of choice for the majority of the web. The author of the article infers that Mullenweg thinks 90% of WordPress development will be JavaScript based in the next…