WordPress 6.3 PHP Compatibility

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Some time ago, we commented on the compatibility of WordPress with PHP 8. Since the release of this version of PHPPHP PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a general-purpose scripting language especially suited to web development. PHP code is usually processed on a web server by a PHP interpreter. On a web server, the result of the interpreted and executed PHP code would form the whole or part of an HTTP response., and the major versions of WordPress that have appeared since then, have led to the creation of concepts unknown to the WordPress community, such as “betaBeta Beta is the software development phase following alpha. A Beta phase generally begins when the software is feature complete but likely to contain a number of known or unknown bugs. Software in the beta phase will generally have many more bugs in it than completed software, speed or performance issues, and may still cause crashes or data loss. The focus of beta testing is reducing impacts to users, often incorporating usability testing. compatible” or “compatible with exceptions”.

We’ve had WordPress 6.3 with us for a while now, and maybe it’s time to clarify a few things, which we’ll be keeping up with each major version of WordPress as it’s released.

WordPress’ serverServer A server is a piece of computer hardware or software that provides functionality for other programs or devices. Typical servers are database servers, file servers, mail servers, print servers, web servers, game servers, and application servers. requirements

Even if there are more stable software versions, that doesn’t mean they are the ones WordPress recommends.

Note that WordPress 6.3 brings an important update: Dropping support for PHP 5.

This makes WordPress 6.3 requirements:

  • PHP: 7.0+
  • MySQLMySQL MySQL is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). MySQL is free and open-source software under the terms of the GNU General Public License.: 5.0.15+
  • MariaDBMariaDB MariaDB is a fork of the MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS), intended to remain free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License. MariaDB intended to maintain high compatibility with MySQL, ensuring a drop-in replacement capability with library binary parity and exact matching with MySQL APIs and commands.: 5.5+

You can read more at Server requirements.

WordPress’ compatibility “at the time”

WordPress 6.3 was released on August 8, 2023, and at that time we had the following components available (stable or security-maintained versions only).

  • PHP: 8.0–8.2
  • MySQL: 5.7–8.1
  • MariaDB: 10.4–10.6 and 10.9–11.0

You can read more at WordPress Compatibility.

WordPress and PHP

PHP is a programming language on which WordPress code is based. This language runs on the server, and it is critical to keep it up to date, both for security and functionality.

WordPress supports many versions of PHP, some even obsolete (PHP Compatibility and WordPress Versions).

WordPress 6.3 (coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Team builds WordPress.) is:

  • fully compatible with PHP 7.01, 7.11, 7.21, 7.31, and 7.41.
  • compatible with exceptions with PHP 8.0, and 8.1
  • beta compatible with PHP 8.2.

1 SECURITY ALERT: These versions are not officially maintained by PHP, so they are considered insecure and obsolete versions and should not be used in production. Check with your hostingHosting A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the World Wide Web. provider about the security maintenance they can do.

What “compatible with exceptions” mean?

PHP 8.0

  • Named parameters. WordPress does not support named parameters.
    PHP 8.0 supports optionally calling functions and class methods by specifying the parameter name, instead of calling them on the order of parameters that they are declared.
    PHP, and many other programming languages, support positional parameters: The caller passes the parameters in the same order the function/method declares its parameters.
  • Filesystem WP_Filesystem_FTPext and WP_Filesystem_SSH2 when connect fails.
    An investigation is underway as to why on some occasions the access to the files returns some type of error.

PHP 8.1

What “beta” mean?

PHP 8.2

  • Deprecation notices
    A deprecation notice is not an error, but rather an indicator of where additional work is needed for compatibility before PHP 9.0. With a deprecation notice, the PHP code will continue to work and nothing is broken.

Hosting Team Recommendation

Taking all this into account, the Hosting Team’s recommendations for WordPress 6.3 are as follows (which may differ from the global ones).

  • PHP: 8.1.x
  • MySQL: 8.0.x
  • MariaDB: 10.11.x

IMPORTANT: These recommendations are intended, primarily, for new installations by hosting providers.

#core, #php

Hosting Team meeting agenda 2023-09-06

The next meeting is scheduled with the following details:

When

Where

At #hosting channel on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/..

Agenda

WordPress Community

  • WordPress 6.4

HostingHosting A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the World Wide Web. Team Time

  • Make/Team Dashboards
  • Events / Contributor Days

Open Floor

  • Anything not in the agenda

Ideas or suggestions

Anything else? Please leave a comment to add to the meeting.

#agenda, #meetings, #weekly-hosting-chat

X-post: Community Summit 2023: Your Role in What’s Next

X-comment from +make.wordpress.org/summit: Comment on Community Summit 2023: Your Role in What’s Next

Hosting Team meeting agenda 2023-09-06

The next meeting is scheduled with the following details:

When

Where

At #hosting channel on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/..

Agenda

WordPress Community

  • WordPress new versions
  • An update to the Field Guide

HostingHosting A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the World Wide Web. Team Time

Open Floor

  • Anything not in the agenda

Ideas or suggestions

Anything else? Please leave a comment to add to the meeting.

#agenda, #meetings, #weekly-hosting-chat

X-post: Community Summit Discussion Notes: PHP version support

X-comment from +make.wordpress.org/summit: Comment on Community Summit Discussion Notes: PHP version support

Hosting Team Meeting Agenda 8-16-2023

WordPress Software

  • WordPress 6.3
  • Phase 3
  • GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/
  • WP 6.4

Community

  • WCUS
  • Contributor Days

Open Floor

Reminder: There won’t be any HostingHosting A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the World Wide Web. Team meetings on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. next week, but there *will* be a Hosting Table at WCUS Contributor Day!! Hope to see you there!

#agenda, #meetings, #weekly-hosting-chat

Hosting Team meeting agenda 2023-08-02

The next meeting is scheduled with the following details:

When

Where

At #hosting channel on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/..

Agenda

WordPress Community

  • WordPress 6.3
  • WordPress 6.4
  • My ticket, my responsibility
  • Contributor Orientation Tool

HostingHosting A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the World Wide Web. Team Time

  • WordPress Hosting Survey
  • Dropping support for PHPPHP PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a general-purpose scripting language especially suited to web development. PHP code is usually processed on a web server by a PHP interpreter. On a web server, the result of the interpreted and executed PHP code would form the whole or part of an HTTP response. 5
  • Updating the Hosting Handbook (for WP 6.3)
  • Upcoming Events / Contributor Days

Open Floor

  • Anything not in the agenda

Ideas or suggestions

Anything else? Please leave a comment to add to the meeting.

#agenda, #meetings, #weekly-hosting-chat

Hosting Team meeting agenda 2023-07-26

The next meeting is scheduled with the following details:

When

Where

At #hosting channel on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/..

Agenda

WordPress Community

  • WordPress 6.3
  • WordPress 6.4
  • Plugins Team, new Team Reps

HostingHosting A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the World Wide Web. Team Time

  • WordPress Hosting Survey
  • Dropping support for PHPPHP PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a general-purpose scripting language especially suited to web development. PHP code is usually processed on a web server by a PHP interpreter. On a web server, the result of the interpreted and executed PHP code would form the whole or part of an HTTP response. 5
  • I18N Performance Analysis
  • Advanced Administration Handbook
  • Upcoming Events / Contributor Days

Open Floor

  • Anything not in the agenda

Ideas or suggestions

Anything else? Please leave a comment to add to the meeting.

#agenda, #meetings, #weekly-hosting-chat

WordPress Hosting Survey

Last week in the Make WordPress #hosting SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. channel (direct link to post here), Matt shared that he would “like to have recommended hosts on the main .org page and all the language subdomains that most align with our values and contribute the most back.” 

As a first step, he requested feedback on a WordPress hosting survey he shared here

Some years ago, the HostingHosting A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the World Wide Web. team was involved in a similar effort and prepared a report at that time, which can be found here.

Those who regularly attend the weekly Hosting team meetings are already familiar with the Hosting team’s recent “Project Bedrock,” which was an updated version of the original report and proposed to create a democratized directory of all hosts that meet a series of predefined requirements.

After reviewing the newer document, Matt challenged us to distill the most salient questions given how many differences there are between the survey he shared and the questions in Bedrock.

Courtney Robertson from the Training team, building off the application, drafted a rubric for scoring potential hosts for inclusion. 

A number of other ideas and notes have been posted by individuals as well, and those of us on the team are thrilled to see a renewed interest in the project and page as a whole. 

It has been proposed that this be a topic for discussion at the Community Summit next month, as well as at the Hosting table during Contributor DayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/..

However, we encourage anyone interested in offering feedback or desiring to participate in the discussion to please do so by leaving a comment on this post.

Whether you’re able to attend in person or not, we want to make sure your thoughts and positions are represented as this discussion continues. 

Hosting Team meeting agenda 2023-07-12

The next meeting is scheduled with the following details:

When

Where

At #hosting channel on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/..

Agenda

WordPress Community

  • WordPress 6.3 status
  • GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ phase 3

HostingHosting A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the World Wide Web. Team Time

  • Dropping support for PHPPHP PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a general-purpose scripting language especially suited to web development. PHP code is usually processed on a web server by a PHP interpreter. On a web server, the result of the interpreted and executed PHP code would form the whole or part of an HTTP response. 5
  • Meeting Update proposal
  • Upcoming Hosting Contributor DayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/.

Hosting Team Projects

  • Advanced Administration Handbook
  • Host Test Runners
  • WordPress Hosting Directory

Open Floor

  • Anything not in the agenda

Ideas or suggestions

Anything else? Please leave a comment to add to the meeting.

#agenda, #meetings, #weekly-hosting-chat