It’s never been a more exciting time to be writing PHP in the WordPress ecosystem! WordPress core recently bumped the minimum-supported PHP version from 5.2 to 5.6 and plans to bump it again later this year all the way to 7.2!
Whether that least sentence incites feelings of jubilation or anxiety in you, this talk has your back. We’ll take a deep dive into ways devs of all levels can breathe new life into their plugins and themes with modern PHP features and principles.
We’ll cover back-compat gotchas, including how to deal with version-specific features and code partial plugin activation so you don’t break users’ sites with your upgrades. We’ll also go over modern principles such as using autoloaders and namespaces, setting up group aliasing, using return type declarations, leveraging traits, and more.
Finally, we’ll talk about how to create a development plan for the short- and long-term so that continual and improvement and iteration can keep you up to date with modern PHP development.