What is PHP?
PHP is an open-source, server-side programming language that can be used to create websites, applications, customer relationship management systems and more. PHP is used extensively in building sites using Drupal, Wordpress and CiviCRM.
What are we doing and why?
Like all programming languages, PHP is being constantly reviewed and updated to improve, stay secure and keep in step with the other elements that make up your site and CRM. PHP 7.x will go out of support this year which means there will be no-one reviewing, updating or improving it to keep it current and secure, so we need to move everyone onto PHP 8.x which is the supported version.
What are the cost implications of this?
Updating your PHP including updating any modules, plugins or extensions where there is a compatible version available are all covered within your hosting and maintenance fees.
Anything else that may cause problems as a result of the upgrade will need to be removed or fixed at support rate, in the same way as anything that broke as a result of a CMS or CRM version change would be.
Why could this affect my site?
Like a human language, new elements are added and old ones that have fallen out of use or been replaced by better ones are moved. We call these deprecated. While your Drupal, Wordpress and/or CiviCRM are already compatible with the latest version of PHP, contributed code (Plugins, modules and extensions that have been shared with the communities for you to use for free) may not be. If you have custom ones or other custom code (so add ons created just for you), even more so as these will likely not have been updated since they were built.
What testing have you done in preparation?
In preparation of the PHP updates, we have been running scripts to identify incompatible modules and extensions and the team have been investigating solutions.
These solutions include, applying patches, tweaking code and applying updates where available.
Is there anything further I can do to avoid any issues?
If you are concerned that the update could cause you problems (e.g. especially if you know you have a complex site with lots of custom elements) and you have a staging instance, you may wish us to update staging first for you to test. This falls outside of your hosting and maintenance fees so there would be a charge to perform these updates on staging and to investigate and fix any issues you may find.
