
In late October, Yoast CTO Omar Reiss, along with fellow contributors Juliette Reinders Folmer, maintainer of the WordPress Coding Standards Sniffs for PHPCS, and Yoast DevOps manager Herre Groen, compiled and published a comprehensive WordPress/PHP 8 compatibility report. Understand How PHP 8 Could Affect Your Plugin or ThemeĬompanies like Yoast have been preparing for this for a little while now. What this means, essentially, is that until most major themes and plugins are PHP 8 compatible, WordPress cannot be considered fully compatible. For that reason, WordPress 5.6 should be considered ‘beta compatible’ with PHP 8. As such, he points out, “The state of PHP 8 support within the broader ecosystem (plugins, themes, etc.) is impossible to know. WordPress is rarely run just on its own and usually relies on at least one theme and a collection of plugins to function as a blog or web site. However, this does not mean it is safe to upgrade to PHP 8 when WordPress 5.6 is released. “WordPress Core aims to be compatible with PHP 8.0 in the 5.6 release (currently scheduled for December 8, 2020),” he wrote.

In his post, Desrosiers highlights the work that has been done to keep the core software up to date. It should also be noted that many features that were deprecated in PHP 7.x will now be removed in PHP 8.
Should i use php 8 update#
While previous PHP releases have not had too much of an adverse effect on the WordPress ecosystem, this update has some breaking changes that could affect backward compatibility.


Scheduled for release on November 26, 2020, PHP 8 is the next major update to our favorite scripting language. On Monday, WordPress core contributor Jonathan Desrosiers published a detailed post on the Make WordPress Core blog about the upcoming PHP 8 release and how it affects WordPress.
