After PHP 5.2

[Andrew Nacin]

We may very well be able to drop PHP 5.2 by the end of 2015. When we moved to PHP 5.2 originally from PHP 4, we dropped some legacy code and otherwise didn’t do anything resembling a complete rewrite for PHP 5.2 things. In hindsight this was definitely the best approach. But the WordPress codebase could undergo some concrete changes by leveraging 5.3+ specific features such as namespaces and closures. We need to start thinking about what this could and should look like.

[Aaron D. Campbell]

I think this could be a great way to try to both identify potential benefits as well as set proper expectations. I’d love to be a part of this one.

[Patrick Rauland]

+1

[Jenny Wong]

+1 for it being discussed.

[Ryan McCue]

+1

[Morgan Estes]

+1 for “what next?” and also for deciding which parts of 5.x to utilize in core.

[Tom J Nowell]

+1000

[bobbingwide]

Given that PHP 5.3 has reached end of life ( http://php.net/archive/2014.php#id2014-08-14-1 ) I would suggest putting some checks into the Dashboard advising users that they should be getting their hosting upgraded to PHP 5.4 or higher.

It should be clear to the user when the support for PHP 5.2/5.3 will be dropped.
It should also be clear what it means; how this might affect them.

Perhaps also something about the highest level of PHP on which WordPress is supported / has been tested.

Did you really mean 2015?

[Weston Ruter]

I half-jokingly/half-seriously envision moving all existing PHP global-namespace functions for WordPress into a deprecated.php, and then to come up with a normalized/consistent library of functions that take array arguments (finally kill $deprecated = '' arguments, and eliminating 6+ positional arguments to functions). The new WP PHP API could then be namespaced under \WordPress.

This doesn’t address global variables, but that’s a different beast since they cannot be namespaced using PHP namespaces as such.

[Benny]

+1 for suggestion of bobbingwide

Currently the people who never upgrade set the benchmark for the minimal required PHP version. I find that somewhat odd 😉

Wouldn’t it make more sense to set the minimal required PHP level based on the PHP version used by people who do care about keeping their sites secure and thus up to date?

For that it would be interesting to see at https://wordpress.org/about/stats/ which WordPress version is used by the people still on PHP version 5.2. I guess most of them are not on WP 4.0?

Also, I think if a PHP version is EOL, i.e. when it no longer will get security fixes, that WP should follow. Those EOL (end of support life) dates are known years ahead so e.g. when WP 4.1 comes out it could warn PHP 5.2 users that starting with WP 4.x that PHP 5.2 will no longer be supported. Maybe with a link to WordPress.org page explaining the why and the how. E.g. a lot of hosting control panels have a simple selector where you can switch the PHP version your self!.

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