Support

September 29, 2022 at 8:07 am

Hi Joseph,

What version of PHP are you using? You’ll need PHP 7.4 as a minimum, and it’s compatible up to PHP 8.0.

September 29, 2022 at 9:18 am

Hi Joseph,

I understand your situation; we deal with these types of dependencies among software every day.

I’ll talk to the team, but to be clear, we must, over time, raise our PHP requirements. Newer PHP versions help, in many ways, facilitate better applications.

Also, even though an update is available for Event Espresso with a higher PHP requirement does not mean you have to install Event Espresso 4.1.39.p right now. You can wait to update Event Espresso until you’re ready along with your other software. But we want to be among the software you use that is prepared and available for to upgrade PHP. We also cannot maintain backward compatibility forever, we have to keep moving forward with the other software that we all rely upon.

However, you should be working on getting all the software you use up-to-date and ready for PHP 8.0+, and have a process for regularly updating your application software. You probably know and are working on that, but for anyone else who reads this message it’s important to have processes to keep software up-to-date.

September 29, 2022 at 9:55 am

Hi Joseph,

Thanks for the feedback. I’m sorry the changelog was not updated yet, it’s in progress. There is an email announcement already in the queue to be sent in 65 minutes.

Your fix is simply to install a prior version of Event Espresso, which could be done in 2 minutes.

September 29, 2022 at 12:54 pm

Hi Joseph,

Firstly, apologies for the mix-up here.

We need to hold our hands up, we made a mistake when adding the last couple of PHP8 fixes into the release. The reason for the syntax error is down to 2 files using Typed Properties, which are a PHP7.4+ specific feature.

We’ve just pushed 4.10.40.p with those removed and that should fix the above.

However, something to note here is that we will be setting EE4 to require PHP7.4 in the not-too-distant future. 4.10.39.p should have been compatible with PHP7.2 as it’s very similar to .38 just with some general fixes and PHP8 fixes (99.99% of the codebase was 7.2 compatible, 4 lines of code were not).

PHP7.2 is officially EOL and has been for almost 2 years now, I’m aware that Ubuntu is maintaining a version for the LTS but many hosts are already forcing PHP8 and will no longer support PHP7 at all because officially it is end of life and we can’t keep compatibility with EOL versions forever.

Will the latest EE support PHP 8.1 or only 8.0?

PHP8. WP itself doesn’t officially support PHP8.1 at this time.

Currently, we can’t use many of the PHP7 features as shown above and PHP8+ has breaking changes in itself so again we won’t be able to use even half of the new features PHP8.1 adds as it stands.

September 29, 2022 at 2:22 pm

It’s going to be a long time before we can officially say we support PHP8.1, it has much stricter type control which has never been the case for PHP.

As you’ve seen we can’t even use PHP7.4 features without it causing fatals for some, exactly the same will happen if we update the code to fully support PHP8.1

I run PHP8.1 on a few test sites and EE works on those, there are a LOT of deprecated notices because 8.1 changes a lot, but it works. But that’s not an official ‘we do/will support PHP8.1 answer’ because the codebase is nowhere near ready to say its 8.1 compatible.

September 29, 2022 at 2:49 pm

Pretty much, and I say that not just for Event Espresso but in general 🙂