Hi there,
The recommendation isn’t the same as the minimum requirement.
With close to 1 million active installs on a plugin that’s been on the repo for several years, there are always lots of people with old setups which would break if we suddenly added PHP 7+ code.
So while we recommend the latest stable versions of PHP, the code still supports older versions.
Marc.
I understand the difference between requirement and recommendation, still, WP requires 5.6 and you talk about 5.4.
Yes, the current version of WP requires PHP 5.6.
WP-Optimize on the other hand is meant to work on older versions of WordPress as well (from 3.9 at the moment), which have lower PHP requirements.
PHP 5.4 is the minimum version for the minify feature to work, because of the libraries used. There’s no point in rising it to 5.6 or 7, while it works with 5.4, or is there?
Rising the required version only has a purpose if the code actually uses features introduced in a certain version.
In a perfect world, everyone would be using the latest versions of everything. But looking at the WP stats, about 25% of WP installs use versions below v5, and 10% of installs run on versions of PHP under 5.6. Assuming the same proportion of WP-Optimize’s users have PHP < 5.6, it means that around 90K websites could break if we move to 5.6, which we’ll try to avoid.
Now if you do have good arguments why we should up the required version, I’d like to know them to take them into consideration in our future choices.
Marc.
Hi Marc, I’m asking out of a translator perspective and when you say, this is by design, I’m ok with it. Could also have been a leftover, that’s why I was asking.
Out of that box I personally would do everything to make people stop using PHP 5.X
Can be closed. Have a nice day!
Yes it’d be great if everyone was updating their servers to the latest PHP versions. We wouldn’t have to think about breaking people’s sites 🙂
We don’t design the plugin to run on lower versions of PHP (we’ll rewrite anything that’s deprecated in recent PHP versions), but we don’t bump the requirements just for the sake of it. In the future, when there will be language features we really want to use, we will definitely bump the requirements. But for now it’s not necessary.
Anyways, have a nice day, and thanks for translating 🙂
Marc.
