[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #23880: Minimum PHP version in Plugins

[WordPress Trac]

#23880: Minimum PHP version in Plugins
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 Reporter:  TJNowell         |       Owner:
     Type:  feature request  |      Status:  new
 Priority:  normal           |   Milestone:  Awaiting Review
Component:  Plugins          |     Version:
 Severity:  normal           |  Resolution:
 Keywords:                   |
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Comment (by TJNowell):

 Whether it is responsible or irresponsible as a developer to include a PHP
 5.3 plugin in the wp.org repos is irrelevant, and a separate topic. Not
 all plugins come from the wp.org repositories and this change would still
 be useful in we lived in an alternate timeline were wp.org plugin repos
 never existed. Even then, it still doesn't resolve the problem of minimum
 MySQL version mentioned earlier.

 If I write a plugin that uses namespaces and someone finds it and installs
 it on a server running 5.2, it will fail. It should instead degrade
 gracefully and warn the user. The user should be able to see ''"oh I have
 5.2, it needs 5.3"'' and choose whether to upgrade or pick another plugin.

 At the moment we have the worst case scenario as the default scenario. I
 would prefer that a policy of a wordpress.org specific setup did not
 dictate the entire ecosystem

 '''''ps: There are already plugins that require 5.3 or above on
 wordpress.org'''''

 e.g. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-favicons/

 I found a number of other plugins that tried ot do the same thing in a
 cursory search but had to do refactors to fix problems for people using
 5.2 who reported problems as crash bugs. Those developers looked bad for
 writing buggy code, despite their code being perfectly fine.

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Ticket URL: <http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/23880#comment:19>
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