Changes between Initial Version and Version 1 of Ticket #33381, comment 53
- Timestamp:
- 09/10/2015 02:17:34 PM (9 years ago)
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Ticket #33381, comment 53
initial v1 3 3 Here is the thing. No one ''needs'' newer versions of PHP. You can code around most of the new features. However, the resulting code isn't very nice. It is hard to read and hard to maintain. For WordPress core this frankly isn't a huge issue, because there already is a massive amount of technical debt that core contributors graciously bear for end users. 4 4 5 However, plugin authors don't have that luxury. Many of us don't have massive teams of dedicated people who can support that technical debt. As such, the benefits of newer versions of PHP are very beneficial. So much so, that many plugins now ''require'' their users to have later versions of PHP. This means that instead of WordPress taking the lead on this issue, plugin developers are forced to educate their users on what PHP means, why the php version is important.5 However, plugin authors don't have that luxury. Many of us don't have massive teams of dedicated people who can support that technical debt. As such, the benefits of newer versions of PHP have much more value to us. So much so, that many plugins now ''require'' their users to have later versions of PHP. This means that instead of WordPress taking the lead on this issue, plugin developers are forced to educate their users on what PHP means, why the php version is important. 6 6 7 7 So while it is great that WordPress isn't being a bully, it is making plugin authors and WP trainers, and developers, etc... take on the responsibility of educating their customers. Or stick with supporting PHP 5.2, which can often lead to very difficult to manage codebases with a lot of technical debt. Simple things like late static binding has the ability to make lots of code in complex plugins more sane, and would also have benefits for core itself.