ClassicPress Adds PHP 8.0 Support, Image Lazy Loading, And More In v1.5.0
After a lot of hard work, a lot of testing, and many cups of coffee and tea went into releasing v1.5.0, which brings full support for PHP 8.0.
You should upgrade ClassicPress to v1.5.0 before changing your PHP version. This version is still fully compatible with PHP 5.6.
Note, we always recommend creating a backup just in case.
The core team and the community have tested this version thoroughly and it should work out of the box for the majority. But, every ClassicPress and their hosting environment is different so please report any issues you encounter. You can do it either in the forum under the release notes or directly open an issue on GitHub to get a faster response from the core team. Make sure you report your exact PHP version.
Please remember, this does not include PHP 8.1 yet. Some community members have reported that ClassicPress v1.5.0 works with PHP 8.1, but we do not officially support PHP 8.1 yet.
More Goodies
In addition to the long-awaited PHP 8.0 support, this version includes additional goodies:
- The “Add Plugins” page displays plugins supporting ClassicPress first from the WordPress repository
- Added support for image lazy loading to speed up your websites
- Added support for Update URI plugin header
- Theme editor now handles modern CSS without reporting errors
- Fresh ClassicPress installs will now disable Comments and Avatars by default (no more unnecessary spam on new installs)
These are just highlights. To see all the changes and fixes, please see the release notes.
Don’t forget to say “thank you” to the core team. They’ve put in a lot of work to make this happen!
Support ClassicPress
As always, this is a community-driven and funded project. If you can, please donate to support ClassicPress. You can also support ClassicPress through GitHub Sponsors. Donations are tax-deductible in the US.
If you’re an avid Amazon shopper in the US, please designate ClassicPress Initiative to allow Amazon to donate a percentage of your purchases to ClassicPress.
About Viktor Nagornyy
Director at ClassicPress Initiative. Marketing consultant. ClassicPress and WordPress expert. Navy vet.
Sorry if this is a FAQ, but what is the problem with PHP 8.1 support in CP core? It was released over a year ago, and has been the default version of PHP in one of the most popular server OSes, Ubuntu, for ten months.
Consider that a lot of work was done to support PHP 8.0 and it consisted mainly on a lot of backports from WP.
And while we are supporting PHP 8.0 WP support for PHP 8.0 and 8.1 si still experimental.
the problem is that to support PHP 8.1 some changes need to be made to core. We do not have the number of devs other open source projects have available and so every change we can make to core takes time. At the moment the core team is trying to leverage the gap by using WP 6 as a base for a clean re-fork so that they can apply CP specific things to it and go from there, and a new process of cherry picking WP improvements not related to blocks or things we do not want as a community has been proposed by @alvarofranz who is also the one coming up with the suggestion that a re-fork might speed up our processes (to which I do agree I must say).
What I have to say is that despite not having the same number of devs as WP does, CP has gone a long way on its own already and I am thankful to the core team for all that they were able to achieve.
Yes, in one sense the main problem is with the PHP devs (the people who once gave us ‘if int > maxint’ in the PHP source) for keeping on breaking backward compatibility and the consequent issues that has caused everyone, but what has caused me to finally renounce WP is that the last version of PHP it officially supports is out of support as far as PHP devs are concerned.
(I was using WP with the Disable Gutenberg extension.)
Our focus is now on v2.0, which will include support for PHP 8.1. This will help us maintain better WP and PHP compatibility. Any help is welcome and appreciated.