Let’s cut to the chase, Shopsys Framework will now exclusively support PHP 7.4.
Shopsys Framework is always made with backward compatibility in mind. For that reason we supported even older versions of PHP and even locked installed dependencies as if they were installed on PHP 7.2.
But the language itself is evolving, the libraries used are evolving too. New features come in, important security fixes are implemented and the great deal of focus of many developers come to the new versions.
Initial release of PHP 7.2 was almost three years ago and this version is no longer actively supported and even security support stops in a few days.
PHP 7.3 will stop being actively supported in a month or so (even though security support will remain for another year – see https://www.php.net/supported-versions.php).
In general, it’s not a good idea to run an application on an unsupported version of the PHP.
Many used libraries release new versions with PHP 7.4+ compatibility only, which forces us to be locked on older versions without important fixes or new features available.
We silently count on the project developers to use the newer version and drop support for lower versions by themselves, but it’s not something we’re happy about in the long term.
Keeping compatibility with such old versions makes maintaining the Shopsys Framework and mostly projects based on SSFW unnecessarily harder and without any added value (on the contrary in fact).
For all that we carefully decided to drop support for any older version of PHP than 7.4.1 in the upcoming v9.1.0 release (see https://github.com/shopsys/shopsys/pull/2109).
Support of modern 7.4 allows us and project developers to benefit from a new syntax and features (https://www.php.net/releases/7_4_0.php) and allows updates to the new versions of libraries to implement new features and improve the developer experience.
We don’t make this decision lightly, as we realize this change made in a minor version can be problematic for some installations, but since v9.0.0, PHP 7.4 is a default version used if you benefit from the provided Dockerfile, so your code should be more than ready for this change.
We’re thrilled to see your work made on top of the Shopsys Framework’s new version benefits from the modern version of the PHP itself and we look forward to your contributions.
