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Still, CS-Cart and Multi-Vendor 4.9.1 will no longer support PHP versions from 5.3 up to and including 5.5; we’ll be recommending PHP 7.1. If the server has an old PHP version, you won’t be able to start the upgrade to CS-Cart 4.9.1. Here is what we all gain by giving up on the old PHP versions:
1. Security will increase. Any support of PHP 5.5 officially ended in 2016. PHP 5.6 still receives security fixes, but even they will stop coming by the end of 2018. The support of PHP 7.1 will end in 1 year and 2 months. According to unofficial statistics, PHP 5.6 is still used relatively widely, so we are not bumping the minimum required version to 7.1 just yet.
2. Your store will work faster. PHP 5.6 is twice as fast as PHP 5.3 in some operations. It doesn’t mean that if you upgrade to PHP 5.6, your CS-Cart store will work twice as fast. But you’ll most likely gain some increase in speed, because certain parts of the code will work faster.
3. The quality of code will increase. It may not look like an advantage to store owners, but only at first glance. Supporting older PHP versions meant we couldn’t use the advantages of newer versions (for example, we couldn’t update third-party libraries to versions that didn’t support PHP 5.3 anymore). Now we’ll be able to make the code simpler and, in some places, faster. We think it will increase development speed and help us further reduce the number of bugs.
4. Development will be more efficient. About once a month we have to spend extra time just to make sure that something we implement works properly on PHP 5.3. That time could have been spent on improving CS-Cart and Multi-Vendor instead.
We’ve made this announcement so that people would have time to update their PHP version. CS-Cart and Multi-Vendor 4.9.1 are coming October 2018. We’ll tell more about them in the blog before the release. In the meantime, feel free to discuss the changes in the required PHP version in this topic.
