[ikoshkin]

Currently CS-Cart and Multi-Vendor can work on a broad range of PHP versions: from 5.3.6 to 7.2. It’s convenient for store owners—that increases the chances of the software installing and running smoothly without the need to change server configuration or ask your hosting provider to do that.

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.

[tbirnseth]

Certainly hoping you intend to add a "pre check" to an upgrade that will block the upgrade until the current PHP version is sufficient for running the software.  No reason to put merchants in failure mode for something so easily detected.

[johnbol1]

. If the server has the 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:
 

I think he covered this tony

[tbirnseth]

Okay, great.  Missed that caveat.  Glad it's there.

[mokeshop]

Currently CS-Cart and Multi-Vendor can work on a broad range of PHP versions: from 5.3.6 to 7.2. It’s convenient for store owners—that increases the chances of the software installing and running smoothly without the need to change server configuration or ask your hosting provider to do that.

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.

 

 

hello, is there a relase date known ?

[ikoshkin]

hello, is there a relase date known ?

Hello. We're planning for this week. Please stay tuned. Our blog is the first place where we'll announce it, and will have most of the information. Email notifications and forum announcement are usually made within an hour or two after that.

[mokeshop]

thank you for the information, so i can plan to update and so....

 

best wishes and please bug-free

 

 

thank you

[FDGWEB]

We've done about 20 upgrades in the last year for PHP 7.2 compatibility. Most have gone well. It is usually the 3rd-party add-ons that have the most trouble .. or need to be discarded if they have not continued development.

 

MCrypt is no longer available in 7.2 so that has been the culprit for all add-ons that send passwords back and forth to other web services like Mailchimp, etc.

 

For carts that use custom functions we just have to update those one by one.

[tbirnseth]

Deprecated class constructors are what I find the most.  I.e. in earlier PHP you could use the class name as the name of the constructor method.  Now it must be _construct().

[poppedweb]

Deprecated class constructors are what I find the most.  I.e. in earlier PHP you could use the class name as the name of the constructor method.  Now it must be _construct().

 

I have seen many add-ons and most of the devs for CS-Cart seem to prefer a functional approach rather than a object oriented approach.

[tbirnseth]

Varies....  Seems that some developers use 3rd party classes that may be based on old versions of PHP.  Most commonly things like shipment labels, etc. that may come from vendors for interfacing to their environments.  Many haven't updated to current vendor versions.