php 8

Hi @vermaakpetrus, thanks for your message.

Our QA Lead recently addressed this in another topic which explains the current situation and hope it helps you out:

The message saying that Wordfence is “not yet officially supported on PHP 8” will be removed soon. We’ve been testing with PHP 8 even when it was still in beta, and have continued to test after the initial compatibility fixes in October and early December.

The main purpose of this message was to recommend to users that they don’t update too soon, because many plugins, themes, and WordPress itself were not fully compatible.

Wordfence itself is compatible with PHP 8, but with tens of thousands of other plugins and themes using some of the same WordPress hooks that we use, it’s still possible for plugins or themes to cause conflicts with Wordfence that only occur on PHP 8 — especially plugins and themes that have not had any recent releases, or if they have a relatively small install base.

At the time PHP 8 was released, WordPress 5.6 described their PHP 8 support as “beta compatible”: https://make.www.ads-software.com/core/2020/11/23/wordpress-and-php-8-0/ WordPress 5.7 did not mention PHP 8 in their release announcement, and they have still had some recent fixes for PHP 8 compatibility, including two coming up in WP core in the 5.8 beta, to be released in July.

I agree that 7 months is a long time. But for previous significant PHP releases, like 7.0 or even 7.4, we did not find it necessary to add such a message at all, because there were fewer breaking changes that in the language itself.

You are welcome to run Wordfence on PHP 8 — just keep in mind that there are risks of compatibility with other plugins or themes.

Thanks,

Peter.

@wfpeter Thank you so much for the in-depth and detailed reply! It is certainly encouraging and brings ease of mind, as Wordfence (in our opinion) is the leader in WordPress security! We’ve not found a better free plugin that does what Wordfence does. None of our WordPress sites (and there are many) running Wordfence ever get hacked.

We’ve been running php 8 on our staging servers for a while now, and at least for us, there are no compatibility issues with the plugins we use.

So it’s full steam ahead to switch over to php 8!

Hi @vermaakpetrus,

That’s really great news and I wish you all the best for running your PHP 8 site going forward. Thanks for the kind words, we really appreciate hearing them!

Peter.