Switch to PHP 7.4

  • Hi all,

    I’m not entirely sure what caused the problems I had, but it is related to WordPress, so I thought I’d start here.

    The other day I decided to try out PHP 7.4, and for the most part it seemed to work.

    The first problem I had was for some reason, when on PHP 7.3 or earlier, the .user.ini file was being ignored and the php.ini was being read. When I upgraded to 7.4 my site gave a fatal error because the .user.ini file had an old path from a previous hosting account, which PHP 7.4 was now trying to read. Correcting the file path fixed that problem, but I ended up deleting the .user.ini file because Wordfence doesn’t need it if you host with Siteground.

    The other problem was when editing a post using the Divi theme and classic editor I got a server 500 error when clicking ‘update’.

    Basically I’m trying to figure out if there is something I can do myself to make my sites run on PHP 7.4, or if I should just wait it out and stay with 7.3 for now.

    In other words it would seem not everything is 100% compatible with PHP 7.4 just yet?

    • This topic was modified 5 years, 3 months ago by Jan Dembowski.
Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Tyler

    (@tylerthedude)

    Hi Sean,

    There should not be any updates within PHP 7.4 that would cause confliction with the WordPress Core since most functions still remain the same and I don’t believe there has been a release of newly unsupported functions. However, there could potentially be a problem with another plugin or theme that’s causing these fatal errors to happen, but I do not think it’d be explicitly due to PHP 7.4. You may look over your PHP error logs and see if anything is being reported there, and depending on the error you can see if another plugin or theme is representing odd behavior.

    However, you could always just use PHP 7.3 for the time being.

    Regards,
    Tyler

    Thread Starter Sean

    (@sean-h)

    Hi Tyler,

    I think I’m going to leave it all on PHP 7.3 for bit longer because there nothing breaks, at least nothing that I’m aware of.

    I think the benefits/performance gains of upgrading our main blog to PHP 7.4 from 7.3 are not really worth the effort when it comes to figuring out why some things break on 7.4, unless of course someone has some theories to offer, then I’m all ears as 2 of the sites in my hosting account are just basic holding pages which I don’t mind using as test subjects ??

    Dion

    (@diondesigns)

    The issue isn’t whether WordPress is 100% compatible with PHP 7.4, it’s whether PHP 7.4.0 is stable for production use. It isn’t…and that’s been the track record of the first few releases of every new PHP branch for, well, forever.

    The PHP developers maintain two active branches, a “development stable” (aka “bleeding edge”) branch and a “production stable” branch. I insist that my clients use the latest version of PHP in the “production stable” branch on their production servers.

    For what it’s worth, the performance improvement from 7.3 to 7.4 in miniscule compared to updating from 7.1 to 7.2, or from 7.2 to 7.3. There is a new (and potentially very dangerous) extension in 7.4, and 7.4 updated mysqlnd to support encrypted logins in MySQL8 and MariaDB 10.4. So…unless you need the updated mysqlnd, there is little reason to use PHP 7.4. (It should be noted that a good server administrator will have the ability to backport the updated mysqlnd to 7.3.)

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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