Day Zero of PHP 7 – Give it a try!

Today PHP 7 has reached its General Availability status. As you probably know it has been available on SiteGround servers for quite a while and you can refer to an earlier post of ours about its features. Now it has reached GA status which means PHP7 can be used on production sites.

PHP 7 Adoption Status Among CMS Used By Our Clients

Many of the most popular content management systems on our servers such as Drupal, WordPress and Joomla! have decided to support PHP 7. Some of them have already officially announced that their code is compatible with PHP 7 and others will need more time to get to that point. Here is what our tests indicate as of today:

• Drupal 8 – Officially supports PHP 7. Available for download.
• Drupal 7  – Works with PHP 7. Available for download.
• WordPress 4.3.1 – Works with PHP 7. Available for download.
• Joomla! 3.4.5 – Does not support PHP 7.
• Joomla! 3.5 – Supports PHP 7. Will be released in January 2016.

Please have in mind that even if you’re using an app that supports PHP 7.0 some of its components like plugins, themes, modules, etc. may have old code that will not work on the latest version. This is why we advise that you always test on a staging environment before you enable it on your live site.

How to Enable PHP7 on SiteGround servers?

To enable PHP 7 for a certain account or part of an account you can use the PHP Version Manager in your cPanel:

Important Notice for the Users of our SuperCacher plugin for WordPress

Up until now our SuperCacher plugin for WordPress (SG CachePress) has been using the Memcache PHP PECL module. The Memcache PECL, however, is not available for PHP 7. PHP 7 is working with Memcached only. That is why today we released a new version of the SG CachePress plugin which uses Memcached – a new PECL for PHP, which provides more features and better performance.

If you would like to take advantage of the PHP7 and Memcached for your WordPress site, please follow the steps below:

1. Update the SG CachePress plugin to the latest version – 2.3.0.
2. Disable the plugin from the WP dashboard.
3. Re-enable the plugin to apply the new Memcached settings.
4. Change the PHP version for your site from the cPanel -> PHP Version Manager tool.