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Is there any interesting information about PHP requirements of Joomla 4 and Framework 2.0?

Joomla development team has taken over a year to build the next Joomla generation which is Joomla 4.0 and Framework 2.0. To bring to us many new and interesting features of Joomla 4, they have worked on routine maintenance and paid off several technical debt projects by removing deprecated code as well as increase the minimum supported software stack. Today article will show you some information about Joomla 4 new PHP requirement, which may be useful for you!

Why do we need to upgrade to PHP 7?

PHP 7 is now the main and only PHP version that is fully supported. In addition, PHP5 will be no longer supported, because all the previous PHP versions are now stopped being supported, and PHP5.6 is the only version of PHP 5 branch which is maintained. By the time Joomla 4 stable releases, the earliest supported PHP version will have under one year to get security support.

September 2012 was the time Joomla 3 first release, it is going to have at least eight years to be supported until reaching the end of support time. Let’s say this year Joomla 4 releases and it will have the same support period with Joomla 3.x, so Joomla 4 will be able to maintain support until 2025 at the minimum. This is a long time of supporting software with the main aim to build and manage websites.

Time to adopt PHP 7

PHP7 has been released as the major version of PHP language. It requires almost extensions and software packages to be updated to the latest version with its language for variable degrees. Through Joomla community usage statistics which has been reported, all installation with data from the system launching from beginning 2016, nearly 17 percent of sites using PHP7.

17% seems to be small but according to statistics server and data from all websites reporting information, and public data including websites, they are not online anymore or just being set up not to send data. By the time Joomla 3.7 released, the rate of websites using PHP 7 has increased to 42%, also, the rate of websites that use PHP 5.5 and earlier versions have gone down.

We have to recognize that the trend of using PHP 7 is being popular. Therefore, using PHP 7 as required for the next Joomla 4 is reasonable.

What if you don’t upgrade?

As we have known, Joomla 3.9 will be the final version of branch Joomla 3.x, this version is going to be supported within 2 years since the time it releases, the same with Joomla Framework 1.0 packages. Let’s say if Joomla 4 launches this year 2018, your site will be able to run Joomla 3 smoothly until the year 2020. When support time reaches its end, you will need to rush to have it upgraded because PHP and Joomla version which support Joomla 3.x will stop supporting by that time, also the server software packages and distributions.

Will this upgrade impact the core code?

In Joomla 3.x, PHP 5.3.10 is the minimum PHP version supported. While phasing out PHP5 support, we can develop many features as well as optimizations in the code. When changes are carried out, the existing API might not be affected but some features which implemented are going to have backward compatibility breaks when accepting. To avoid unexpectable error, please follow these policies which are relating to Framework 2.0 and Joomla 4 with new/existing code:

• Methods from the final classes (which are enabled to be extended with definition), private methods, which can be updated for getting PHP7 typing in use.
• All brand new classes and methods in the new major versions can take advantage of all available features available of PHP 7, return type declarations and scalar type hints included.
• Protected and public methods from existing classes won’t have the method signatures changed except when the change improves the understanding and code using.

CONCLUSION

That’s all of our blog post today about the new PHP Requirements of Framework 2 and Joomla 4! Thank you so much for reading! If you have any relating question,  please leave a comment below, we will reply as soon as possible!

From: Joomla Official

ET Digital Team

We’re a Digital Team from EngineTemplate with 5 content experts. Our team has 5 years exp in open source Joomla and WordPress, we make daily blogs and build useful resources for everyone who is having issues with open source while using it.