PHP 5.6 or PHP7 ?

Hey Everyone.


So working on a WordPress project, one designer said they are only releasing plugins for PHP5.6, and was adamant about it too.

So my question and thoughts...why would someone still want to force others to only use PHP5.6, while other designers have already released updates for PHP5.6 and PHP7?

A majority of people are still on PHP5.6 which is alright for the short moment, although active support ended last month...and we won't get into those that are still 5.4, 5.3, and I've seen some mention 5.2, but why only 5.6?

My thoughts...coders/designers that force people on 5.6 are either lazy, or tested out 7 and saw how much their codes break, and the amount of work needed for it to make sense...especially since many of codes that break in 7 are on the deprecated list.

Now some will argue that it's PHP who forces these changes on people, but it's been a year since it was released. Even Ioncube which people were complaining about would take months can accommodate 7.....so why not designers?

WPCycle said:

My thoughts...coders/designers that force people on 5.6 are either lazy, or tested out 7 and saw how much their codes break, and the amount of work needed for it to make sense...especially since many of codes that break in 7 are on the deprecated list.

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This is it.

The speed improvement of switching to PHP 7 alone is worth not using any of those plugins.

If it doesn't support PHP 7, I won't use it. I'd prefer a faster website with less functionality that a plugin would normally provide rather than a slow website with the added functionality. And this is what plugin developers/designers need to understand. They'll likely switch or recode their plugins once they notice a big drop in customers. And trust me, they will.

I think a lot of web designers would choose 5.6 knowing that some businesses aren't aware that PHP 7 is much better. Later on, the web designer could try to say "want to make your website faster? We can recode your site for PHP 7 for 'x' amount of money". That way the web designer can make more money. Probably that or the reasons already mentioned above like lazy or don't know PHP 7 as good.

WPCycle said:

Hey Everyone.


So working on a WordPress project, one designer said they are only releasing plugins for PHP5.6, and was adamant about it too.

So my question and thoughts...why would someone still want to force others to only use PHP5.6, while other designers have already released updates for PHP5.6 and PHP7?

My thoughts...coders/designers that force people on 5.6 are either lazy, or tested out 7 and saw how much their codes break, and the amount of work needed for it to make sense...especially since many of codes that break in 7 are on the deprecated list.

Now some will argue that it's PHP who forces these changes on people, but it's been a year since it was released. Even Ioncube which people were complaining about would take months can accommodate 7.....so why not designers?

Click to expand...

Honestly from this post https://forumweb.hosting/13630-is-php7-worth-it.html?p=81816#post81816 of VirtuBox, I wanted to use Php7 on any sites but because some addons could not work with it so I had to rethink before upgrade to php 7.

It depends on many factors, not mean Php 7 is good then I will must it immediately.

WPCycle said:

A majority of people are still on PHP5.6 which is alright for the short moment, although active support ended last month...and we won't get into those that are still 5.4, 5.3, and I've seen some mention 5.2, but why only 5.6?

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Because they don't want to have changes or don't have time to make changes for their systems/codes/addons/plugins to be compatible with php 7.
who will pay for them to change their codes, it consumes more time, let's think if they see benefits to change codes work with php 7 then I am sure they will do that with no conditions.

HostXNow said:

I think a lot of web designers would choose 5.6 knowing that some businesses aren't aware that PHP 7 is much better. Later on, the web designer could try to say "want to make your website faster? We can recode your site for PHP 7 for 'x' amount of money". That way the web designer can make more money. Probably that or the reasons already mentioned above like lazy or don't know PHP 7 as good.

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Agreed, that's one of reasons why web designers didn't want to upgrade to php 7 for their clients.

HostXNow said:

I think a lot of web designers would choose 5.6 knowing that some businesses aren't aware that PHP 7 is much better. Later on, the web designer could try to say "want to make your website faster? We can recode your site for PHP 7 for 'x' amount of money". That way the web designer can make more money. Probably that or the reasons already mentioned above like lazy or don't know PHP 7 as good.

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Gecko said:

I wouldn't doubt that there are some out there that will and/or are going to be using that as an easy way to make some extra (Undeserved) money. I have seen way too many people around the web these days that do things along those lines.

If there is a way to make easy money working in areas with shades of "Scam" written all over it, someone is doing it.

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That's a very good point although funny enough I've seen the opposite or even with this project...just a refusal to work with anything new.

One cart I helped a client with years ago was still on PHP5.2 while people were going towards 5.6 Even after 5.2 was done, they weren't ready. This forced the client to split their websites. They wanted to move everything to a new web host, but the cart would not work with any host who updated their PHP at the time. When I spoke to the designers, they just didn't really care. Quite sad for the amount of money people were paying them monthly.

fwh said:

Because they don't want to have changes or don't have time to make changes for their systems/codes/addons/plugins to be compatible with php 7.
who will pay for them to change their codes, it consumes more time, let's think if they see benefits to change codes work with php 7 then I am sure they will do that with no conditions.

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This is valid, but they are going to run into a road block in the next few years.

I would recommend you to stick with PHP 5.6 for next few months because there are lots of WordPress plugins which are not completely supported by PHP 7. Also there are few bugs in it.