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If you’re still confused about this requirement of Joomla 4 and Framework 2.0, this article is for you!

It has been over a year for Joomla 4 development team to build the upcoming Joomla branch that is Joomla 4 with Framework 2.0. Routine maintenance has been carried out and some technical debt projects have been paid off by deleting the deprecated code and raise the minimum supported software stack, so we can receive the Joomla 4 version with many new and amazing features. In today article, let’s discuss more about the PHP requirement of Joomla 4, which might contain necessary information for you!

Reasons to upgrade PHP 7

Up to now, PHP 7 is the only main PHP version of this language which has full support. Besides, PHP 5 is going to be stopped supporting soon, since all earlier PHP versions are no longer supported, only PHP 5.6 is maintained. As soon as Joomla 4 stable version launches, the PHP version which is the earliest supported will have less than one year to be supported security.

Joomla 3.x was first released in September 2012, and it will have 8 years at minimum to get support when approaching the end of the support period. For instance, if Joomla 4 launches this year and has similar support time with Joomla 3.x, then Joomla 4 may be maintained to support till 2025 at least. This will be a long time to support software with the major purpose which is building and managing websites.

Ready to adopt PHP 7

PHP has released PHP 7 as the main version of this language. This version requires most of the extensions with software packages to be up to date with themselves language for variable degrees. As reported by usage statistics of Joomla community, every installation has data from system launching in early 2016, almost 17% websites running under PHP 7. It might be a small number but the statistics server and data of all sites which reported information, public data including sites, they are no longer online or they are set up to not send data. When Joomla 3.7 version released, PHP 7 using websites rate has risen to 42%, besides, the number of sites which use PHP 5.5 and previous versions also decrease. In conclusion, we can see that there is a PHP 7 adoption of Joomla users. So it is reasonable for Joomla team to use PHP 7 as required for the next Joomla 4.

What happens if I don’t have it upgrade?

It is important for you to be aware of the Joomla 3.9 release which is the final version of Joomla 3.x. This version will be supported in two years after its release, Joomla Framework 1.0 packages are the same. For example, if Joomla 4 releases in this year, your site is able to run under Joomla 3 without a problem until 2020. When the time run out, it will be a rush to get it upgrade, the reason is that both Joomla and PHP version that support Joomla 3.x will stop supporting, as well as server software packages along with distributions.

Will it impact the core code?

PHP 5.3.10 is the minimum PHP version supporting Joomla 3.x. We can build many features and optimizations in the code while phasing out PHP5 support. Existing API may not be impacted when changes are conducted, however, some features that implemented will have backward compatibility breaks when accepting. Because these below policies are relating to Joomla 4 and Framework 2.0 with existing or new code, please follow them to avoid any error happen:

• Methods from final classes (which are enabled to be extended with definition) and private methods, are possible to update for getting PHP 7 typing in use.
• All brand new class and method in the new major versions can take advantage of all available features available of PHP 7, return type declarations and scalar type hints included.
• Protected and public methods from existing classes will not have their method signatures replaced unless the change improves understanding and code using (the methods which could use variadic signatures).

Conclusion

That’s all of our article today about PHP Requirements of Joomla 4 with Framework 2.0! Thank you so much for reading! If you have any relating question, feel free to let us know by leaving a comment below, we will reply as soon as possible!

From: Joomla Official

AgeThemes Digital Team

We’re Digital Content Marketing team from AgeThemes Marketplace. We provide quality content for everyone who using open source CMS like Joomla and WordPress. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free leave your comment, we happy to assist you asap.