PHP 7.4 release schedule

This notice relates to the following platforms: VIP Go

The VIP Go platform will upgrade to PHP 7.4 in February 2021. This is a minor version upgrade bringing new features, bug fixes and a few incompatibilities. The full list of changes can be found in the official Migrating from PHP 7.3.x to PHP 7.4.x guide.

Schedule for a February 23, 2021 production deployment

We are planning a staged-release that will deploy PHP 7.4 to development environments before deploying to production environments.

• December 15, 2020: Development environment deployments.
• February 1, 2021: Remaining non-production environment deployments, commonly called preprod on VIP Go.
• February 23, 2021: Production environment deployments.

If you would like to update your environments before these dates, please open a support ticket with the WordPress VIP team.

Testing with PHPCompatibilityWP

The WordPress VIP team recommends testing your codebase locally and then in VIP Go development environments in readiness for the production deployment.

To help quick-start your testing, the WordPress VIP team will scan the master branch of your VIP Go GitHub repositories with PHPCompatibilityWP and create new GitHub issues for identified incompatibilities. We’ll also open a support ticket with you containing links to these issues once the scan is complete.

We then recommend:

1. Updating your local development environments to PHP 7.4.
2. Adding the PHPCompatibilityWP ruleset to your PHPCS implementation, and using testVersion 7.3- to run the relevant compatibility checks.
3. If you are making use of Git submodules, we recommend scanning those as well.
4. Reviewing and acting on warnings or compatibility issues raised.

Once compatibility warnings have been addressed, we also recommend you perform your own integration or end-to-end testing to confirm your application behaves as expected.

PHP 8 deployed in September 2021

PHP 8 is scheduled for general availability on November 26, 2020, and we would like to take this opportunity to provide guidance regarding VIP Go’s release schedule for upcoming PHP versions.

The WordPress VIP team will deploy PHP version updates yearly in September. By making this schedule more predictable, we’re aiming to provide you time to plan and prepare in advance. This ten-month window from the general availability release allows time for the new version of PHP to stabilise and the WordPress community to release updates.

We recommend that you stay abreast of the VIP Go platform releases by subscribing to VIP Lobby email updates and following our Platform (Major) Release Schedule page.