At the beginning of September we announced that a PHP 7 upgrade is coming to VIP and asked that you test all themes and plugins against PHP 7 in preparation for that change. We’ve opened tickets with any clients where we noticed code that would definitely cause errors, such as the following:
- Deprecated PHP 4 style constructors
- Continue or break statements outside of loop/switch contexts
- Removed POSIX regex functions and “e” regex modifiers
But we will still rely on you to thoroughly test for code that may generate warnings or notices, or cause other problems once the upgrade is complete. Some of the most common changes in behavior to watch for include:
- Function argument(s) returned by “func_get_args” might have been modified
- Possible internal array pointer access/modification in by-value foreach loops
- Potential iteration over arrays in nested by-reference foreach loops
- Indirect access to variables, properties, and methods is strictly evaluated from left-to-right
- Declaration of classes’ function definitions must match any class they extend.
You will find the full list of backwards incompatible changes here: http://php.net/manual/en/migration70.incompatible.php .
You can use an updated PHP 7 version in your local development environment, and the VIP Quickstart environment has also been updated to support PHP 7 for those testing WordPress.com sites.
We will announce the specific timing of the upgrade on WordPress.com and VIP Go soon, but please complete your PHP 7 testing on or before Saturday October 15th so that your site will continue to function as expected after the upgrade is complete.
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