[wp-hackers] php -v

[Ryan McCue]

Dion Hulse (dd32) wrote:
> FWIW, I did a random sampling of some 3.7.1 API requests, and that too
> showed about 50% of users on 5.2.17, which mostly agree's with
> http://wordpress.org/about/stats/ (I was really hoping that PHP 5.2 was
> more common amongst older versions of WordPress, but that was proved wrong)
> 
> A number of larger american hosts defaulted to PHP 5.2 a long time ago and
> never forced users to update. A number of them are currently mass-migrating
> users to PHP 5.3 so it'll be interesting to see how that changes the tide
> in the coming months.

In addition, there's a bunch of different people working with hosts to
push this forward. I hate to be opaque and not give any details, but
suffice to say that there's a few big hosts pushing forward on this now.

The PHP-FIG (Framework Interoperability Group) is looking at a new
GoPHP5-style initiative, and I'm acting as the (unofficial)
representative for WP there as well.

----

With regards to the arguments that we could rearchitecture WP to be more
modern, etc etc, that's realistically not going to happen due to
backwards compatibility concerns. I doubt we'll be switching out for
autoloaders any time soon (they have performance concerns that need to
be fully concerned, for one), for example. It's also pretty unlikely
that we start rewriting pieces of WP to use 5.3+ features.

Maintaining a separate branch for compatibility is also not a real
option. We tried it before with 2.0, and as Mark Jaquith can attest, it
sucked to manage.

As much as I'd love personally to go and rewrite a heap of WP to fit in,
it's realistically not going to happen.

The (perhaps unofficial) policy that I recall is that we can try out
5.3+ features as a sort of progressive enhancement that's only available
to 5.3+ users as a sort of enticement. As far as I know, we haven't
actually had any issues where 5.3+ would be required for a feature, or
at least that couldn't be done in a 5.2-compatible way, so there's been
no significant push there.

----

This all said, if you want to help make WP better in this regard, get in
and start helping out. I'm trying really hard to make the WP-API project
[1] a model to follow with regards to modern WP features; there's
interfaces *and* reflection! My hope is that some of the WP-API core
will end up merged into WP's core (that is, WP/WP_Query/WP_Post/etc) and
have significant effects outside just the API.

If there's specific areas of WP that you think need modernisation (and I
don't necessarily mean 5.3+ things; we still have PHP4 idioms in
places), do something about it. Mention it here if you think it's a
major issue, and we can start a discussion about it. Even better, create
a proof-of-concept patch!

[1]: https://github.com/WP-API/WP-API

-- 
Ryan McCue
<http://ryanmccue.info/>