Re: Changing fundamental language behaviors

> Many of these are ticking bombs - unmaintained extensions with possible security issues. Totally agree. > Right now the biggest problem of WordPress ecosystem is quality of community extensions and > themes. Being intimately involved in the WordPress ecosystem, I do not know If it is the *biggest* problem. But I digress... > Cutting of all old and unmaintained extensions may be not that bad... It depends on who you ask if it is bad or not. I think that many on this list would think it is a good thing. OTOH, I think many people who have working websites that currently use one of these plugins and who do not have developers on staff would think it is a very bad thing. Especially if such a change could cost them a significant unplanned amount of money and hassle to resolve. Which brings up an important point. There is a big difference between the plugins in the WordPress.org <http://wordpress.org/> repo that might have security issues I think the WordPress Core team would be open to sunsetting any plugins that are objectively found to have security issues, or even major PHP compatibilities. OTOH, given that WordPress is over 1/3rd of the web that means many of these plugins are active on working sites, sites where their web host might encourage them to upgrade to PHP8 when PHP 7 is no longer supported. It is those people who are likely to be most negatively affected, and the vast majority of them will never have hired a developer in their life let alone understand why a handful of people decided to "break their site" without them having any say in the matter. #fwiw -Mike P.S. Again, I want to clarify I am not saying what the PHP core team should do. I am simply relaying what I think the ramifications are likely to be — based upon my experience with WordPress since 2010 and PHP since 2008 — if breaking changes are introduced into PHP 8. It is up to the voting members to actually decide what will happen. > On Sep 13, 2019, at 1:11 AM, Robert Korulczyk <robert@korulczyk.pl> wrote: > >> Upgrading the ~68,000 open source plugins available on wordpress.org >> <http://wordpress.org/>, thousands of commercial plugins, and >> and an untold number of custom-developed bespoke plugins and custom themes is where the concern >> lies. > > Many of these are ticking bombs - unmaintained extensions with possible security issues. Right > now the biggest problem of WordPress ecosystem is > quality of community extensions and themes. Cutting of all old and unmaintained extensions may > be not that bad... > > > Regards, > Robert Korulczyk