Since last week, the PHP versions 8.3 and 8.4 are available on CloudPress, and 8.3 is the standard for new CloudPress sites. In this blog post, I’ll explain what that means and what improvements are included.
Each new PHP version brings significant improvements in performance and security. As the code is continuously cleaned up and optimised by the PHP Foundation, each version is slightly faster and more efficient. The latest PHP version, PHP 8.4, was released in November 2024.
WordPress generally works well with new PHP versions, but full stability is not always guaranteed immediately. Plugins and themes also need time to be tested and adapted. That’s why we choose to always use one version ‘older’ as the standard. PHP 8.3, released in November 2023, has now received broad support from plugin and theme developers, making it a reliable choice.
New features in PHP 8.4
- Property hooks: This allows you to define logic for retrieving and setting properties, resulting in less boilerplate code.
- Asymmetric visibility: Provides the ability to assign different access rights to properties, giving you more control over data manipulation.
- Performance optimizations: Various internal improvements result in faster code execution and more efficient memory management.
- New DOM API: Includes standards-compliant support for parsing HTML5 documents, resolves several long-standing compliance bugs, and adds multiple functions to make working with documents easier. The new DOM API is available within the Dom namespace. Documents can be created with the Dom\HTMLDocument and Dom\XMLDocument classes.
If you have any questions or need help converting your site to these new versions, please don’t hesitate to contact us!
Next up on our roadmap; advanced cache management in the CloudPress interface. Stay tuned! 👀
Sources
https://www.php.net/releases/8.4/en.php
https://www.php.net/releases/8.3/en.php