zlacker

Older versions of PHP are supported with security fixes for a while. There's no need to upgrade to 8.2 right now, at all.

>>adlpz+(OP)
The 7 series is 'done' with security updates as of now. https://www.php.net/supported-versions.php

So there's some argument to be made to be in the 8.x series. It's probably not something you should be losing sleep over just yet, but at least have it on your roadmap to address in the coming months.

>>adlpz+(OP)
Sadly, there is, kind of.

Shared webhosters (speaking for Germany) have started to disable support for PHP 7.x as there are no security patches anymore.

That made it necessary to upgrade lots of WordPress pages, especially older ones had some quirks in themes that broke with PHP 8.

I've updated around 25 sites for an old friend (she's more into the design/content part, not the dev part) and made good money with that. "Stupid" work nevertheless, would've preferred to do something better than run a PHP 8 linter and see where it breaks...

>>martin+u5
> I've updated around 25 sites for an old friend (she's more into the design/content part, not the dev part) and made good money with that. "Stupid" work nevertheless, would've preferred to do something better than run a PHP 8 linter and see where it breaks

Exactly. It's work for our engineers but not something to get excited about. Plus you need to explain to the client why they're paying $1000 for something called "PHP" which they have no concept of.

>>mgkims+A3
There are nice improvements that make it worth it to upgrade, but yeah, and you can also just use a Linux distribution that provides support for older versions of PHP (such as Debian stable or the Sury packages).

We upgrade our clients in waves, so sites in dev get the latest PHP, which lets up contribute to upstream PHP projects to fix issues, and by the time it's merged upstream, we can update our older clients without any worries.

>>martin+u5
Using a shared hosting provider is a choice you're making there though. If you know you're going to be managing legacy codebases for a while you're far better off spinning up your own box on cloudlinux, which has PHP security patches going back to the early 5.x releases.

It's unreasonable to expect standard hosting providers to cater to those kinds of needs IMO.

>>josefr+P5
> It's work for our engineers but not something to get excited about.

Totally not, yeah!

My friend also was surprised/shocked that there were changes in the code necessary to keep those old sites up and running.

Next thing was installing and setting up the "OMGF" plugin to cache Google fonts for GDPR compliance. Stupid work, but quite a few billable hours.

I think the WordPress ecosystem really is... "struggling" (lack of a better word) with how the modern web and the world around it evolves.

>>esskay+N7
Well, yeah, but if you're a two person design agency, which builds WordPress sites on top of $popularTheme in a pair with $Pagebuilder... You don't care that much about controlling your hosting environment...

But I get your point. :-)