This recap is a summary of this week’s PHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 5.6.20 or higher meeting. It highlights the ideas and decisions which came up during that meeting, both as a means of documenting and to provide a quick overview for those who were unable to attend.
The meeting’s chat log.
Attendees: @afercia @clorith @drewapicture @drivingralle @flixos90 @jdgrimes @joostdevalk @jorbin @ottok @overclokk @paulstonier @pross @ptasker @spacedmonkey @vizkr
Chat Summary
The main agenda for this week was to review the copy the marketing team has been working on in regards to the “Before Upgrading PHP” document.
Here is the discussion summary:
- As WordPress recommends a specific PHP version on the requirements page, it was decided that that same version should be used on the Servehappy page (currently 7.2). Vague version terminology like “PHP 7+” or similar should be replaced accordingly.
- A few minor changes to the copy were suggested and added to the Google document as a comment.
- The part about the backup not including the PHP version might need to be clarified, but on the other hand it might unnecessarily scare away site owners from proceeding. This is something that still needs to be figured out.
- On a side note, the PHP Compatibility Checker plugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party should make it easier to run the check after the installation. Currently there’s simply a submenu item added in the admin (and super admin), but no link or anything to it, so the user has to search for it which is bad UX User experience.
- There was a discussion regarding the proposal in #42858, to bump the minimum version requirement in PHP 5.0 and make 4.9 some kind of LTS version. The gist of the discussion was that this would be a problematic move as it would leave deliberately leave users behind which is against WordPress’ principles. An eventual version bump should be announced well in advance, and there should be enough time to educate site owners on the topic and prepare them for the upgrade instead of forcing them to either upgrade immediately or be left behind. The Servehappy page should be a major contributor to that education, but before it is in place, no measures in regards to a minimum version bump should be taken. Once it is live, #40934 and #41191 will be the two main tickets that need to be worked on for core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. so that site owners can actually be made aware of the problem.
The rest of the meeting focused on a few organizational items:
- Writing the weekly recap posts is an extra maintenance burden that may possibly not be worth the effort. A regular update would still be valuable though, so a good alternative would be to write a monthly update post or just an update post when something major was decided. If you have been reading these weekly recaps and find them particularly useful, please leave a comment on this post, otherwise the team will move over to writing decision-dependent update posts.
- Once Servehappy is set in stone, one of the next major goals of the initiative will be to discuss and come up with more patterns and standards in core, in order to at least in the future prevent rather random decisions by individual developers, causing an inconsistent codebase. As of now however, Servehappy is the sole priority.
Next week’s meeting
The next meeting will take place on December 18th, 2017, 16:00 UTC as always in #core-php. The agenda will be to plan spreading the word more, particularly by asking for more feedback in the weekly development chat. If you have suggestions about this but cannot make the meeting, please leave a comment on this post so that we can take them into account. See you next week!
#core-php, #php, #summary
