php5 support

[Florent Bouillon]

Hello,

Like way too much websites, I am still running on php 5.6, which is going to be ended at the end of this year. I have a simple question for the developers; will IPS still support this oldie after the official end? By supporting I mean: will the next updates require php7? If I'm not done yet with php7 at the time, it would be of course sad to not be able to perform updates for a while, in particular in case of security ones.

eventually, bonus question: in regard of the IPS code only, is there anything/configuration to prepare other than simply switching the server from php5 to php7 one the live website?

Thank you for your answers 🙂 

[Tom S.]

Well, I would highly recommend going through the motions of upgrading. You will be better off doing it now rather than later. I believe IPS works pretty well with version 7+ so you do not have to worry too much there. Unless you have any other applications/scripts dependent on 5.6.

I would also suggest you use this file to make sure your system has everything it needs in place:

I do not know how technically knowledgeable you are, but if you want to be extra safe you can set up a test site on a domain running php 7 and see if everything works there before committing the change to live. 

[Florent Bouillon]

17 minutes ago, Tom S. said:

Well, I would highly recommend going through the motions of upgrading. You will be better off doing it now rather than later. I believe IPS works pretty well with version 7+ so you do not have to worry too much there. Unless you have any other applications/scripts dependent on 5.6.

yes, it's the case. Most of my website is constituted of pages with own scripts, IPS (last version, 4.3) being above all the englobing structure. I plan of course of converting the whole website to php7, but it will be time-demanding,and I don't know if I'll be ready already at end of the year, therefore my question here.

Of course I will check on my test site before applying in production, actually I made a test once and it crashed the whole test-website, but it was probably because of own uncompatible scripts integrated everywhere. ^^

[Rhett]

We normally support older php versions as long as they are officially supported by php, once they reach end of life, we also move forward and drop support for them. 

http://php.net/supported-versions.php

With that said, php 5.6 & 7.0 will officially be end of life in Dec 2018 (by php), so I would look to upgrade to php 7.2 as soon as you can.

In order for our development team to take advantage of new and improved features of PHP, it often requires depreciating past outdated versions in order to leverage the abilities of new versions.

 

 

 

[bfarber]

We always recommend using at least the recommended version of PHP shown by our upgrader/the support tool/the requirements checker script.

At any point we may switch that to the required version. Unfortunately we cannot guarantee PHP5.6 support in the future.