PHP 8

Executive summary: As of 2022-10-29, Tiki doesn't support PHP 8.0 or 8.1. Tiki24 and Tiki25 work beautifully on PHP 7.4.x While PHP 7.4 support from PHP itself ceases support in November 2022, various actors of the ecosystem continue support by backporting security patches. The Tiki project will pursue work to support PHP 8.x in Tiki26.

Details

According to W3Techs, PHP 7 is used by 71.2% of all the websites who use PHP. PHP 8 is only at 5.6%, beaten by PHP5 at 23.1% Source: https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php

Some web hosting companies will cease supporting PHP 7.x as soon as PHP does. However, other hosting companies continue to offer it. Some charge extra for this service because

• They want to incite clients to move to PHP 8.x which is better and uses fewer resources (hosting company saves on resources)
• To help cover the cost of security backports. Even if PHP doesn't support PHP 7.4 any more, some Linux distributions will backport security fixes.

We have an automatic daily test upgrade from Tiki 24 to Tiki 25 with PHP 8.1 to monitor progress:
https://dev.tiki.org/Pre-dogfood-servers-for-Tiki-25-release-process#Trunk_with_PHP81

At this time, there is no point in reporting bugs on PHP 8.x unless you have the development skills to actually do the work, or you have financial resources to sponsor the work. Please reach out to Marc Laporte if you can help.

Related links

• https://tiki.org/forumthread78628-Tiki-24-and-PHP-8
• https://github.com/remicollet/php-src-security
• https://www.freexian.com/lts/php/