[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #33381: Strategize the updating of minimum PHP version.

[WordPress Trac]

#33381: Strategize the updating of minimum PHP version.
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 Reporter:  alexander.rohmann                    |       Owner:  jorbin
     Type:  enhancement                          |      Status:  assigned
 Priority:  normal                               |   Milestone:  Awaiting
Component:  General                              |  Review
 Severity:  normal                               |     Version:
 Keywords:  needs-codex dev-feedback 2nd-        |  Resolution:
  opinion                                        |     Focuses:
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Comment (by dd32):

 > you shared some pretty interesting data. Any chance on getting those for
 March 2017?

 I actually tweeted that data recently -
 https://twitter.com/dd32/status/834613251178508289
 >  WP4.7-only stats of [PHP] 5.6 @ 43%, 5.4 @ 20%, and 5.5 @ 14%, PHP 7.x
 is @ ~10% leaving only 12% for PHP 5.2+5.3

 * PHP 5.2: ~2.5%
 * PHP 5.3: 9%
 * PHP 5.4: 20%
 * PHP 5.5: 14%
 * PHP 5.6: 43%
 * PHP 7.0: 10%
 * PHP 7.1: ~1.5%
 (Note, these numbers are rounded, yet shockingly add up to 100%)

 While PHP 5.2 for WordPress 4.7 is at <3% now, which is much lower than
 the ~5.5% figure which represents all versions 3.0~4.7, what those figures
 don't tell you is just how many people would be affected by a forced
 change.

 On average, at every WordPress event you go to, 3 out of every 100 people
 are probably running PHP 5.2 - and have no idea what PHP is, there are
 hundreds of thousands (or millions) of people who are in that group of
 people.
 You could say that those 3 people probably don't go to WordPress events,
 but you'd be surprised, they're the new users on bad hosts, those who have
 had a WordPress site that had just worked for the last 5+ years, they're
 the ones who rely upon WordPress doing it's job and running their site,
 taking away all the technicalities of publishing on the web.

 WordPress isn't going to blindly drop support for those users - and we're
 not going to bump the required version of PHP while not actually requiring
 it - that user experience comes first.
 Moving to PHP 5.3 gains core nothing, Moving to PHP 5.4 gains core nothing
 either - if there were features in those versions which were needed by
 WordPress - we'd have moved already.
 Supporting the older versions in core does not bring a significant barrier
 to contributors, many new functions that we've needed (JSON, Hashing, PHP7
 random functions, Multibyte and autoload) have been
 [https://core.trac.wordpress.org/browser/trunk/src/wp-includes/compat.php
 shimmed] with PHP variants which allow us to use the functionality in the
 older versions - sure, it might not be as performant, but it works just
 fine.
 If PHP versions prevent you from contributing to WordPress, submit the
 patch anyway and note it requires PHP 8, someone else can alter it to work
 back to 5.2 - determining what the issue is and what code needs to fix it
 is 90% of the work.

 **Plugins and Themes can require a higher version of PHP than what
 WordPress does. You do not have to support an outdated version of PHP or
 outdated install of WordPress** - I don't support anything older than PHP
 5.4 and WordPress 4.4 at present, that's a choice I've made, and every
 time someone contacts me (at least once a week) asking why the plugin
 doesn't work for them, I explain that the detailed error message meant
 they need to contact their host, you can do that too.

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/33381#comment:93>
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