I was cruising through the admin login to one of the websites I look after, when I noticed an out-of-date plugin needed upgrading (depending on the scope and depth of a plugin’s requirements, I may have them set for auto upgrade. This one hooked into a range of WordPress functionality and also made 2 calls into php, so that’s a big fat “no!” from me on the auto upgrade.
Anyway. I hit the ‘upgrade now’ function and waited about 2 seconds and it bounced unupgraded. So I did the ‘upgrade now’ thing again and, after about 2 seconds, it too bounced. So I looked into the error log and that plugin required php8.3 or newer to run. Well, that’s interesting. So I went into cpanel, looked at the php version and slap ne sideways with a wet herring, I was currently running php7.2 which, cpanel helpfully informed me, was ‘deprecated’.
So, obviously, I backed up the databases on that website then upgraded the host machine from php7.2 to php8.3 and crossed my fingers (leaning heavily on the well-known technical talisman for good luck, there). The good news is that all worked fine, thank you very much.
But then, being dilligaf diligent, I then had to visit every single host machine for all of the websites I look after to check (and upgrade if necessary) the core php version to 8.3. By the time I’d done that, my hot chocolate had become very cold chocolate so I’m just wondering who it is I complain to about that?
I think my php version is 7.something and is therefore outside of its Best Before date.
I keep thinking that I should update it… but I’ve never done it before, so I’d probably bugger it up.
Thing is, it seems to be working OK, so, if it ain’t broke…
I read, the other day, the biggest incentive to keeping php current is website speed. Apparently (according to the info I read) old php can slow things down. I have no evidence to support this claim though