The PHP minimum version bump is happening! As noted in this Trac ticket, WordPress’s support for PHP 5.2 – 5.5 officially ends now, and the minimum required PHP version is 5.6.
As Scott Arciszewski explains, the impending release of WordPress 5.2 is great news for WordPress security. Another recent commit “adds a pure PHP implementation of the cryptographic functions supported in PHP 7.2+” and “provides the necessary backwards compatibility required to support signature verification and other security features going forward across all supported PHP versions.”
Gary Pendergast wrote a series of tweets about WordPress 5.1’s upgrade notice:
WordPress folks are doing our part to help clean up the ancient PHP installs that are still running a large percentage of the internet, and we’re find that this isn’t an insurmountable problem…. It just requires a bit of patience and empathy to solve.
WordPress 5.2 goes a long way to deliver this much-needed spring cleaning. 🧹
