Loading...
 

PHP 8

Executive summary: PHP8 support started in Tiki26. The minimum is PHP 8.1 (PHP 8.0 will never be supported). If you are on PHP 7.4, please use Tiki24 LTS.

As of 2024-01-01, the migration to PHP 8.1 was pretty much done, and there will be more issues popping up from time to time as more community members upgrade their Tikis. Mostly to Tiki27 LTS.

Details:
While official PHP 7.4 support ended in November 2022, various actors of the ecosystem continue support by backporting security patches. The Tiki project will support PHP 8.1 in Tiki26, with planned support for PHP 8.1, 8.2 and 8.3 in Tiki27LTS. We are now Using GlitchTip as part of the Tiki development process so this will permit to catch issues that are undetected by the static analysis tools.

Details

A major version is a good time for major innovation, including changes that are not backward-compatible.

  • PHP 7.0 was released on 2015-12-03, and then we saw 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 and 7.4
  • PHP 8.0 was released on 2020-11-26, and then we saw 8.1, 8.2 and 8.3 (8.4 is expected)


Backward-incompatible changes once per 5 years is quite reasonable. And Tiki needs to adapt accordingly.

Adoption of PHP8 is slow:

According to W3Techs, PHP 7 is used by 71.1% of all the websites who use PHP. PHP 8 is only at 5.8%, beaten by PHP5 at 23.0% Source: https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php
According to W3Techs, PHP 7 is used by 71.1% of all the websites who use PHP. PHP 8 is only at 5.8%, beaten by PHP5 at 23.0% Source: https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php


One way to interpret this is that the community is very pleased with PHP7 and not in a hurry to take advantage of the better performance and features of PHP8. But it's also because it's significant work for some projects. The upgrade to PHP8 is significantly more challenging than the upgrades to PHP7 or PHP5.

Some web hosting companies will cease supporting PHP 7.x as soon as PHP does. However, other hosting companies continue to offer it. Some charge extra for this service. They may want to incite clients to move to PHP 8.x which is better and uses fewer resources (hosting company saves on resources).

Even if PHP doesn't support PHP 7.4 anymore, some Linux distributions will backport security fixes. Check with your hosting provider for details.

The Tiki community has an automatic daily test upgrade from Tiki 25 to Tiki 26 with PHP 8.1 to monitor progress:
https://dev.tiki.org/Pre-dogfood-servers-for-Tiki-26-release-process#Trunk_with_PHP81

Please reach out to Marc Laporte if you can help. At this phase, we need developers that can help adapt code to PHP8 in Tiki, but also in external libraries that we get from Composer.

  • Check if external lib supports PHP8. If not, investigate and help make it happen.
  • If lib supports PHP8, switch Tiki to use it and make sure everything is working as expected. If not, help make it happen.


Once that has been done for all libraries, we'll be looking for volunteers to test Tiki instances with PHP8. Doing so with GlitchTip would increase efficiency in bug reporting.

PHP8 brings massive innovations and will facilitate improving many things in Tiki, notably performance, error reporting and Realtime handling.

With such a big code base / feature set, it is a lot of work (and during some of the same period as the move from Bootstrap 4 to 5). If you have financial resources to sponsor the work, please reach out to Marc Laporte.

Attached files

ID Name Comment Uploaded Size Downloads
127 2022-10-29-php8-not-yet-popular.png Screencapture from https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php Marc Laporte 52.72 Kb 109

doc.tiki.org

Get Started

Admin Guide User Guide

Keywords

Keywords serve as "hubs" for navigation within the Tiki documentation. They correspond to development keywords (bug reports and feature requests):

Accessibility (WAI and 508)
Accounting
Articles and Submissions
Backlinks
Banners
Batch
BigBlueButton audio/video/chat/screensharing
Blog
Bookmark
Browser Compatibility
Link Cache
Calendar
Category
Chat
Clean URLs
Comments
Communication Center
Compression (gzip)
Contacts (Address Book)
Contact us
Content Templates
Contribution
Cookie
Copyright
Credit
Custom Home and Group Home Page
Date and Time
Debugger Console
Directory of hyperlinks
Documentation link from Tiki to doc.tiki.org (Help System)
Docs
Draw
Dynamic Content
Dynamic Variable
External Authentication
FAQ
Featured links
File Gallery
Forum
Friendship Network (Community)
Gmap Google maps
Groups
Hotword
HTML Page
i18n (Multilingual, l10n)
Image Gallery
Import-Export
Install
Integrator
Interoperability
Inter-User Messages
InterTiki
Kaltura video management
Karma
Live Support
Login
Logs (system & action)
Look and Feel
Mail-in
Map with Mapserver
Menu
Meta Elements
Mobile Tiki and Voice Tiki
Module
MultiTiki
MyTiki
Newsletter
Notepad
Payment
Performance Speed / Load
Permissions
Platform independence (Linux-Apache, Windows/IIS, Mac, BSD)
Polls
Profiles
Profile Manager
Report
Toolbar
Quiz
Rating
Feeds
Score
Search engine optimization
Search
Search and Replace
Security
Semantic links
Shadowbox
Shadow Layers
Share
Shopping cart
Shoutbox
Slideshow
Smiley
Social Networks
Spam protection (Anti-bot CATPCHA)
Spellcheck
Spreadsheet
Stats
Surveys
Tags
Task
Tell a Friend, alert + Social Bookmarking
TikiTests
Theme CSS & Smarty
Tiki Manager
Trackers
Transitions
User Administration including registration and banning
User Files
User Menu
Watch
WebDAV
Webmail
Web Services
Wiki History, page rename, etc
Wiki Syntax
Wiki structure (book and table of content)
Workspace
WSOD
WYSIWYCA
WYSIWYG
XMLRPC

Tiki Newsletter

Delivered fresh to your email inbox!
Newsletter subscribe icon
Don't miss major announcements and other news!
Contribute to Tiki