Latest update is causing issues with servers with PHP 7.4 or less

Safe SVG 2.1.0 was released yesterday and with that update, we bumped the minimum PHP version from 7.0 to 7.4 so that is now a hard requirement to run this plugin.

The reasoning here is that PHP 7.4 and under are officially marked as end of life and as such, we are working to bump minimum supported versions in all of our plugins (eventually to 8.0+, so this is basically a step in that direction).

Hi Darin,

Yes, completely understood, but we are the mercy of some hosts and was wondering if there was a more graceful way of saying 7.4 is min requirement where it could automatically disables or push an admin dashboard warning message or something instead of bricking the site? We had to completely remove it from all our clients in the short term. It was quiet a firedrill morning. Thanks. If not really feasible, we’ll leave it off until the host can update or find another solution.

Thanks,

Garrett

@bumpstop I totally understand issues around getting hosts and clients to update to 7.4 (though I’d also suggest probably not using a host that won’t support at least 7.4, if not 8.0+).

In this particular case, we bumped the Requires PHP plugin header attribute that WordPress is supposed to consider when installing and (I thought) updating plugins. If you’re site is below the minimum, it’s not supposed to allow you to install (or update).

Curious on how these particular sites received the new update? Was it auto-updates or was it something that you manually triggered? For sure this is something that should be handled gracefully and I thought WordPress itself did that but if not, that’s something we’ll want to see if we can address for any future version bumps.

@dkotter

Yes, the sites have auto-updates turned on by WordPress, as well as Shield. I’m not sure which take precedence. To answer your question though, they all updated automatically, which gave us the screen of death with that PHP error posted in my original post. Appreciate you looking into it.

Garrett

Same issue here. That update crashed some of my wordpress installations. I’m using iThemes Sync to remotely keep plugins up to date.

Thanks both for the report. I’ve tried to reproduce myself locally but have not been able to find a way to force WordPress to update a plugin when the PHP version requirements aren’t met.

That said, for those (hopefully unlikely) scenarios where this does happen, we can definitely handle this better within our code, instead of having a fatal error that takes down sites.

I’ve opened a PR on GitHub to address this which should hopefully go out in our next release.