Bump PHP version requirement

[snoringdragon]

Hi,

It’s been around 4 years since wordpress last increased its minimum PHP requirement.
Make post => ​https://make.wordpress.org/core/2018/12/08/updating-the-minimum-php-version/

At that time, only 85% websites were using PHP version 5.6 or higher but wordpress still decided to increase its minimum PHP requirement to 5.6 for security and performance reasons.

Buw now, as per wordpress statistics, only 5.8% wordpress installations are currently running on PHP version 5.6.

I think we are now ready to further increase minimum PHP requirement to 7.0.

With proper coordination with hosting companies and encouraging the sites to increase PHP version to 7.0 by showing message in WordPress 6.1, we will be able to further decrease that 5.8% statistics.

We can target wordpress version 6.2 for this change but we should make a proposal on make blog and try to include message that wordpress version 6.1 will be last version to support PHP version 5.6.

This change will allow wordpress to enhance the security while at the same time get rid some bloat from core, improving the performance. I think this will also pave the way for some good new feature

such as ​https://github.com/WordPress/performance/issues/427.

Thanks for your time.

[dingo_d]

Duplicate of #33381.

There is a ticket for planning PHP updates, and it says that the usage should be less than 5% for WP to drop support for it.

I'd recommend posting this comment in that ticket so it gains more visibility.

BTW I'm fully for dropping PHP 5.6 support :)

[snoringdragon]

Replying to dingo_d:

Duplicate of #33381.

There is a ticket for planning PHP updates, and it says that the usage should be less than 5% for WP to drop support for it.

I'd recommend posting this comment in that ticket so it gains more visibility.

BTW I'm fully for dropping PHP 5.6 support :)

Thanks for letting me know.
I have left the comment on that ticket too.

[SergeyBiryukov]

Hi there, welcome to WordPress Trac! Thanks for the ticket.

As noted above, let's continue the discussion in #33381.