Parse error upon activation, PHP 5.3.3

Hi Ahcj,

thanks for reaching out!

I am sorry that you have run into this issue. You are right that this is because of your dated PHP version.

WP Mailster requires at least PHP 5.5, but is also compatible with PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.

You are also right that we need to make a better communicating this requirement directly in the WP.org listing, however we have this in our documentation on our site: https://wpmailster.com/doc/system-requirements/

I am sure you know, but in the off chance you don’t: PHP 5.3 has not been maintained since for over two years and is considered to have known security issues (https://php.net/eol.php). Your specific PHP version 5.3.3 is even 7 years old (https://php.net/releases/). We really recommend to update to a supported PHP version which does not have that many known security holes.

Again: sorry that you found out after installing it.

Regards,
Holger

Respectfully, I don’t think you understand the context of this problem for production site administrators.

1. The PHP project itself has EOLed 5.3.3, however distros continue to support it with backported security and bug patches of their own.

2. PHP 5.3.3 (with backported security and bug patches) remains the default in CentOS 6.9, which is supported until 2020. More recent versions are not available via their repositories. Hosts would have to upgrade PHP outside of the CentOS packages and assume the maintenance burden from then on.

3. About 50% of sites running PHP as of August 2017 are at versions less than 5.5:
https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php/5/all
https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php/all/all

4. Updating PHP is not like simply updating my Web browser. Real-world production hosts like mine are filled with various work by various developers over at least several years. Bumping PHP further than a maintenance release would almost certainly mean unnecessarily breaking things that are hard to find, probably tricky to fix and written by people I’ve never met who are long gone.

I think it might be reasonable to assume that the language features you’ve used that require PHP 5.5+ were not actually necessary for you to develop this plugin.

I hope you will consider making this plugin available to a greater number of real-world users by removing dependency on those language features. If for whatever reason that’s not an option for you, then I don’t think it should be considered a general release version (anything at or above 1.0) until PHP versions 5.5 and higher become much more widely used.

Across WordPress installations, the PHP 5.5/5.6/7.0/7.1 adaption is currently above 65%. That is the more important metric for me as a WP developer. But I don’t want to argue with you about percentages ??

Anyway, I have decided I will help you and others stuck with older language versions and look to get my code copmatible with PHP 5.3 and 5.4.

That will be included in the next release.

Thank you — I will look forward to it.

Hi,

just wanted to let you know that the new WP Mailster 1.5 release supports PHP 5.3, PHP 5.4 and all newer versions including PHP 7.1.

Regards,
Holger