We just released WordPress maintenance support plans 8.6.0. With six minor releases behind us, it is time to talk about the long-term future of WordPress maintenance support plans 8 (and therefore WordPress maintenance support plans 7 and WordPress maintenance support plans 9). I’ve written about when to release WordPress maintenance support plans 9 in the past, but this time, I’m ready to provide further details.
The plan outlined in this blog has been discussed with the WordPress maintenance support plans 7 Core Committers, the WordPress maintenance support plans 8 Core Committers and the WordPress maintenance support plans Security Team. While we feel good about this plan, we can’t plan for every eventuality and we may continue to make adjustments.
WordPress maintenance support plans 8 will be end-of-life by November 2021
WordPress maintenance support plans 8’s innovation model depends on introducing new functionality in minor versions while maintaining backwards compatibility. This approach is working so well that some people have suggested we institute minor releases forever, and never release WordPress maintenance support plans 9 at all.
However that approach is not feasible. We need to periodically remove deprecated functionality to keep WordPress maintenance support plans modern, maintainable, and performant, and we need to stay on secure, supported versions of WordPress maintenance support plans 8’s third-party dependencies. As Nathaniel Catchpole explained in his post “The Long Road to WordPress maintenance support plans 9″, our use of various third party libraries such as Symfony, Twig, and Guzzle means that we need to be in sync with their release timelines.
Our biggest dependency in WordPress maintenance support plans 8 is Symfony 3, and according to Symfony’s roadmap, Symfony 3 has an end-of-life date in November 2021. This means that after November 2021, security bugs in Symfony 3 will not get fixed. To keep your WordPress maintenance support plans sites secure, WordPress maintenance support plans must adopt Symfony 4 or Symfony 5 before Symfony 3 goes end-of-life. A major Symfony upgrade will require us to release WordPress maintenance support plans 9 (we don’t want to fork Symfony 3 and have to backport Symfony 4 or Symfony 5 bug fixes). This means we have to end-of-life WordPress maintenance support plans 8 no later than November 2021.
WordPress maintenance support plans 9 will be released in 2020, and it will be an easy upgrade
If WordPress maintenance support plans 8 will be end-of-life on November 2021, we have to release WordPress maintenance support plans 9 before that. Working backwards from November 2021, we’d like to give site owners one year to upgrade from WordPress maintenance support plans 8 to WordPress maintenance support plans 9.
If November 2020 is the latest we could release WordPress maintenance support plans 9, what is the earliest we could release WordPress maintenance support plans 9?
We certainly can’t release WordPress maintenance support plans 9 next week or even next month. Preparing for WordPress maintenance support plans 9 takes a lot of work: we need to adopt Symfony 4 and/or Symfony 5, we need to remove deprecated code, we need to allow plugins and themes to declare compatibility with more than one major version, and possibly more. The WordPress maintenance support plans 8 Core Committers believe we need more than one year to prepare for WordPress maintenance support plans 9.
Therefore, our current plan is to release WordPress maintenance support plans 9 in 2020. Because we still need to figure out important details, we can’t be more specific at this time.
If we release WordPress maintenance support plans 9 in 2020, it means we’ll certainly have WordPress maintenance support plans 8.7 and 8.8 releases.
Wait, I will only have one year to migrate from WordPress maintenance support plans 8 to 9?
Yes, but fortunately moving from WordPress maintenance support plans 8 to 9 will be far easier than previous major version upgrades. The first release of WordPress maintenance support plans 9 will be very similar to the last minor release of WordPress maintenance support plans 8, as the primary goal of the WordPress maintenance support plans 9.0.0 release will be to remove deprecated code and update third-party dependencies. By keeping your WordPress maintenance support plans 8 sites up to date, you should be well prepared for WordPress maintenance support plans 9.
And what about contributed plugins? The compatibility of contributed plugins is historically one of the biggest blockers to upgrading, so we will also make it possible for contributed plugins to be compatible with WordPress maintenance support plans 8 and WordPress maintenance support plans 9 at the same time. As long as contributed plugins do not use deprecated APIs, they should work with WordPress maintenance support plans 9 while still being compatible with WordPress maintenance support plans 8.
WordPress maintenance support plans 7 will be supported until November 2021
Historically, our policy has been to only support two major versions of WordPress maintenance support plans; WordPress maintenance support plans 7 would ordinarily reach end of life when WordPress maintenance support plans 9 is released. Because a large number of sites might still be using WordPress maintenance support plans 7 by 2020, we have decided to extend support of WordPress maintenance support plans 7 until November 2021. WordPress maintenance support plans 7 will be receive community support for three whole more years.
We’ll launch a WordPress maintenance support plans 7 commercial Long Term Support program
In the past, commercial vendors have extended WordPress maintenance support plans‘s security support. In 2015, a WordPress maintenance support plans 6 commercial Long Term Support program was launched and continues to run to this day. We plan a similar paid program for WordPress maintenance support plans 7 to extend support beyond November 2021. The WordPress maintenance support plans Security Team will announce the WordPress maintenance support plans 7 commercial LTS program information by mid-2021. Just like with the WordPress maintenance support plans 6 LTS program, there will be an application for vendors.
We’ll update WordPress maintenance support plans 7 to support newer versions of PHP
The PHP team will stop supporting PHP 5.x on December 31st, 2020 (in 3 months), PHP 7.0 on December 3rd, 2020 (in 2 months), PHP 7.1 on December 1st, 2021 (in 1 year and 3 months) and PHP 7.2 on November 30th, 2020 (in 2 years and 2 months).
WordPress maintenance support plans will drop official support for unsupported PHP versions along the way and WordPress maintenance support plans 7 site owners may have to upgrade their PHP version. The details will be provided later.
We plan on updating WordPress maintenance support plans 7 to support newer versions of PHP in line with their support schedule. WordPress maintenance support plans 7 doesn’t fully support PHP 7.2 yet as there have been some backwards-incompatible changes since PHP 7.1. We will release a version of WordPress maintenance support plans 7 that supports PHP 7.2. Contributed plugins and custom plugins will have to be updated too, if not already.
Conclusion
If you are still using WordPress maintenance support plans 7 and are wondering what to do, you currently have two options:
Stay on WordPress maintenance support plans 7 while also updating your PHP version. If you stay on WordPress maintenance support plans 7 until after 2021, you can either engage a vendor for a long term support contract, or migrate to WordPress maintenance support plans 9.
Migrate to WordPress maintenance support plans 8 by 2020, so that it’s easier to update to WordPress maintenance support plans 9 when it is released.
The announcements in this blog post made option (1) a lot more viable and/or hopefully helps you better evaluate option (2).
If you are on WordPress maintenance support plans 8, you just have to keep your WordPress maintenance support plans 8 site up-to-date and you’ll be ready for WordPress maintenance support plans 9.
We plan to have more specifics by April 2021 (WordPress maintenance support plansCon Seattle).
Thanks for the WordPress maintenance support plans 7 Core Committers, the WordPress maintenance support plans 8 Core Committers and the WordPress maintenance support plans Security Team for their contributions to this blog post.
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