Have you seen this recently?
$ svn ci -m 'commit first version of plugin'
Adding trunk/readme.txt
Adding trunk/my-cool-plugin.php
Transmitting file data .......svn: E165001: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: E165001: Commit blocked by pre-commit hook (exit code 1) with output:
***********************************
PHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. http://php.net/manual/en/intro-whatis.php. error in: my-cool-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/my-cool-plugin.php:
Errors parsing my-cool-plugin/my-cool-plugin.php
***********************************
A couple weeks ago, the PHP “lint” part of the SVN Short for "SubVersioN", it's the code management system used to maintain the plugins hosted on WordPress.org. It's similar to git. pre-commit check was changed from using PHP 5.4 to using PHP 7.0. Somewhere in that process, something got broken with regards to the output of the error messages resulting from this check. So, none of the errors show up.
This can be confusing, especially if you’re not running PHP 7.0 yet, because PHP 7 is actually a lot more strict about this sort of thing. You can run the PHP lint process yourself on your own files all day long and not see what the issue is, because it *only* comes up in PHP 7.
My advice: Grab a copy of PHP 7 for your machine, and run “php -l” on the file you’re getting an error message about. There is a valid error, you’re just not seeing it on older PHP versions, which were not quite so picky.
One known case that seems to be cropping up a lot:
The “break” and “continue” keywords are only valid inside a for, foreach, while, do-while, or switch structure. You’ll get the error message of “Fatal error: ‘break’ not in the ‘loop The Loop is PHP code used by WordPress to display posts. Using The Loop, WordPress processes each post to be displayed on the current page, and formats it according to how it matches specified criteria within The Loop tags. Any HTML or PHP code in the Loop will be processed on each post. https://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop.’ or ‘switch’ context in my-cool-plugin.php on line 123”
We’ve been seeing code that has something like this in it:
if ( is_thing() ) {
do_thing();
break;
}
And that is invalid in PHP unless that if is inside a loop. But, previous versions of PHP didn’t show the problem in their lint processes. Not so with PHP 7.
So, make sure to check your code with PHP 7. It’s no fun for people using the newest systems, like we always recommend, to be running into syntax errors. Note that these were actually syntax errors in previous versions of PHP as well (using break and continue makes no sense outside of a loop structure), but now you’re getting told about them by the lint process.
We’re still working on finding the bug not showing you these errors in the pre-commit checks too. 🙂
Edit: Any plugins uploaded to the directory should still be PHP 5.2 compatible. Just because we’re allowing PHP 7 code doesn’t mean this is a free-for-all.
Look at https://wordpress.org/about/stats/ . This isn’t complicated. Your main plugin file can be installed and activated on any of those sites. If you have even 5.3-only code in that main file, then you are responsible for breaking that person’s website, and *you* will get the appropriate review from them for doing so. And we are not going to delete that review just because you ask nicely…
Make your plugin handle failure cases properly. If you want to limit your userbase, then you’re welcome to do so. But do it right. Add code to the plugin to fail gracefully on older systems.
