WordPress specialists
WP Engine have announced the launch of a PHP compatibility checker plugin. WP Engine, which has headquarters in Austin, Texas, United States, was established in 2010. The company has US offices in San Francisco, California and San Antonio, Texas, as well as offices in London, United Kingdom. The plugin is “the web’s first tool to verify PHP 7 compatibility on WordPress websites”.
PHP is a highly popular Open Source (OS) scripting language and the latest iteration of the software is faster and reduces memory consumption. Alongside this it offers a number of security enhancements. WP Engine will make PHP 7 - the latest PHP version - available for all WP Engine customers in late 2016. The company’s customers can use the plugin to check whether the code on their WordPress websites is compatible for the upgrade. WP Engine is also making its plugin available to the WordPress community so “anyone with a WordPress website can check their site(s) and then work to fix any incompatibilities” with PHP 7.
“WP Engine has been working on PHP 7 since it was released,” explained WP Engine’s Product Manager, Taylor McCaslin. “Today, only 1.7 percent of WordPress websites worldwide run PHP 7. More should enjoy the benefits of this new PHP 7 series. However, before that can happen, there’s a lot of work to be done on popular themes and plugins before they are ready. During our work with PHP 7 we developed a tool to help us evaluate compatibility, the ‘PHP Compatibility Checker’ plugin, which we are making available to everyone, to help drive adoption of PHP 7 and bring the promise of dramatically faster WordPress websites and web services to users across the web,” he added.
Do you know of any other providers smoothing their customers’ transitions to PHP7? Let us know the details. Add your comments below.
