Episode 283: PHP 7.4 End Of Life

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Show Summary

Rob Cairns talks about PHP 7.4 going End of Life.

Show Highlights:

1. What does this mean?
2. What you need to test compatibility with PHP 8.x
3. The concerns in the community .

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Show Notes

Hey, I’ll Rob here again and today’s show. I want to talk about PHP 7 for a little bit for those who’ve been living under rock, it goes end of life on November 28th. As of this release date, that’s four days away.

 And that’s a bit of a concern and a problem in talking to some people up at Automattic. WordPress is not totally PHP 8.X compliant, so that becomes a bit of an issue. It should run fine in 99% of cases, but there’s still few cases out there. The other problem is many plugins and themes won’t be updated. Based on some discussions I’ve heard, there’s been a lot of talk in a backroom trying to get the PHP Foundation to extend that life. Past November 28th,

I personally think it’s a really bad time. It’s retail season. It’s not a good time but that side to point. We do know that many WordPress sites still run on PHP five point X versions, and one of the things WordPress has always prided itself on backwards compatibility and those particular versions have been end of life for a long time. So we need to factor that in as well. What would I do to harden and secure my site if I still running PHP 7?

Well, first of all, find out if your web host is going to support 77 for many hosts have decided that they’re gonna pull it almost right away, which I think is a mistake and a disservice to the clients. If for me I’d be running a software firewall on top of the host security, so let’s get something like Patch Stack app which has a built in software firewall or I team security, which also has a software firewall to. Basically, protect your website even if you’re running an old version now, from putting software firewall rules to prevent vulnerabilities, so that’s food for thought.

Then I’d start looking at your plugins. Now if I was going to migrate a site to 8X, what I would do is actually make a copy of that. Site and throw it on a staging site. Don’t do the testing on your live site. Throw the staging site date one. I wouldn’t go to 8.0, that’s just my personal opinion and see if there’s any errors. If there’s errors, go check the arrow ONS or learn to check error logs. The error logs will tell you exactly what plugin and what software is causing the issue. Once you check those error logs. Then you can move forward and say OK. Then you gotta look at the vendors for those plugins and see if they plan to do an update personally. If they don’t plan to do an update, I would be moving forward. With finding a substitute plugin and salt and theme and so on, and that’s kind of how I would approach it.

Once you get all that worked out on a staging site, then throw the live site to PHP 81. As I said before, I personally wouldn’t waste the time going to 8X or 80. Because it’s not worth it. Go right gate one and just be done with it. That’s my take on the PHP 74 going end of life.

Rob Cairns, CEO, founder and chief creator of Mason ideas with stunning digital marketing. Have a great day. Bye bye for now.

 

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