[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #63397: Harder Deprecate ms-files.php

[WordPress Trac]

#63397: Harder Deprecate ms-files.php
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 Reporter:  jorbin       |       Owner:  (none)
     Type:  enhancement  |      Status:  new
 Priority:  normal       |   Milestone:  6.9
Component:  Site Health  |     Version:
 Severity:  normal       |  Resolution:
 Keywords:  has-patch    |     Focuses:  multisite
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Comment (by MadtownLems):

 As one of the people who's still running hundreds of sites on 16 year old
 networks, I'll share some thoughts.

 We'd love to move off of ms-files.php! However, I've investigated it
 several times over the years, and for large, established networks, it
 feels like a behemoth of an operation that I've been nervous to attempt
 (and up until 6.8, really had no reason to).

 The deprecation patch points to this article (https://halfelf.org/2012
 /dumping-ms-files/), which is the most popular and one of the best guides
 out there, from an incredibly knowledgeable WordPress developer. And yet,
 even that contains:

 "I got about 90% successful with it"
 "For most sites, this worked, but in my later work, I determined that it
 actually wasn’t working. It was ignoring this. I don’t know why"
 "Any weird problems? Yeah, two sites"
 "I swear I have no idea why three sites got stuck"

 I'm not opposed to the idea of ending support, but really want to
 emphasize @jorbin's point 1 about preparing some more polished information
 about how to do this successfully. Bonus points for a plugin that does any
 parts of it.


 >  few, if any, sites that still use this are testing pre-releases.

 I'm very active in testing and reporting issues with pre-releases.
 However, we're in the awkward spot where only our Production multisites
 still use ms-files.php. We moved hosts several years ago, and decided to
 start our dev/test environments on a clean slate (but still using the same
 codebase, of course). I didn't realize at the time that meant we'd be
 serving files completely differently and how important that would come to
 be. I imagine others who still use ms-files.php might be in a similar
 situation, contributing to the lack of sufficient testing.

 If anyone working on this wants to connect more about this, feel free to
 reach out on WP Slack (@madtownlems)!

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/63397#comment:4>
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