Increasing the minimum PHP version to 7.4

PHP is moving forward at a rapid pace, with PHP 7.4 reaching end-of-life in a few months, November 28, 2022 while 8.2 is currently in beta. As the language improves with more type-safety and powerful features, we're still stuck with formally requiring at least PHP 7.1 - that has been end of life since December 2019.

Roughly 70% of sites that installed or updated an extra in the past six months are already using PHP 7.4+. SiteDash shows a similar number of 66% of all connected sites being on at least 7.4.

While that means there is still a not-insignificant number of sites, and especially older existing sites, that use an already EOL version of PHP, it does give hope we can start taking advantage of newer features soon. Improvements in the areas of type-safety and static code analysis will help us build better and more reliable extras.

The goal is to start requiring PHP 7.4 for all our extras. 

• New extras we release will require PHP 7.4 (even 8.0 if required) immediately.
• New feature releases for existing extras will also start requiring PHP 7.4 starting January 1st, 2023.
  

The latter will be a gradual roll-out; we wont release updates for all extras immediately in January. But you should anticipate that the majority of our extras half-way through 2023 will need PHP 7.4 by then.

If you don't already have a plan for getting your sites on a more recent version of PHP, this is a great time to start planning! ;)

It's worth noting that this will affect both free and premium extras, with the exception of SiteDash Client. To ensure you can bring your sites into SiteDash, that will continue to support older PHP versions (5.5+ for MODX 2.x, 7.2+ for MODX 3). 

To check what sites you have that may be running an older version, use the advanced search in SiteDash or see the list of your sites in your account.