Upgrading to PHP 8.4

Unless someone is running their website on pure HTML only, one must keep his or her eyes and ears open for the potential upgrade of various technologies that their site runs on. Generally speaking, if someone is using bare-bone CSS and JavaScript on their site, they can probably afford to wake up from a long sleep and they would still find their site up and running without any major issues. Unfortunately, that is definitely not the case for most of the site owners. Almost all the modern web application runs on wide range of technologies which requires some of sort of upgrade or maintenance every now and then.

That issue can get even more complicated if someone developed their application on some sort of custom CMS instead of using widely popular alternatives available out there. Be it WordPress, Joomla, Drupal or BigCommerce, things are much more easier for the users of these applications as there is a big community behind those applications if things goes south. However, that is definitely not the case for those who are running their own custom CMS. If that custom CMS is being developed and supported by an organization or a business entity with pure commercial reason, it becomes much more reasonable and viable to perform those upgrade. It definitely gets worse at individual level since he or she is the only person who knows inside out of that particular custom application and must perform all the necessary upgrades by him or herself. And I am exactly on that boat.

As a web developer these issues are not new to me. However, at times these issues could become very time consuming and daunting task to work on. Things gets even more hectic if the hosting provider are not co-operative. Luckily, I do no t have that issue as of now.

This site primarily runs on PHP scripting language and it uses a MySQL database to store and retrieve data. So, whenever any version update gets released, I need to check on those and perform necessary upgrade or code changes to make sure everything keeps on running smoothly.

Last year, PHP 8.4 was released and it is currently available from my hosting provider to be deployed for my applications environment. This evening, I took my time to perform the upgrade on all of my sites and luckily everything went smoothly. WordPress based site didn't require any major work from my end. Some minor code update is necessary for this particular site as it is entirely a custom CMS. Although it's a minor update this would require me to go through some of the PHP classes that I have written but it won't take long anyway.