Everything breaking Yeah, right. plugin developers that haven't updated their plugins. Yeah, that's a big one, isn't it? Heather? That's a big concern
if you're just joining us, welcome. I am currently getting our caption set up. If you're just joining us in zoom, pop open the chat and say hi, tell us where you're logging in from all right, we should have captioning now.
Glad you're here everybody. We are just about four minutes away from getting started with upgrading your WordPress websites to PHP eight. We have Tiffany bridge from the Nexus team here with us. First webinar for Tiffany here on iThemes Training hopefully not the last.
We'll see how this one goes. Yeah, all right. Not so fast, right?
Yeah, sure.
Old theme gonna be amazing. We're gonna have a great time. Hey, really,
as we got a lot to talk about today, and it's a very important issue getting your site's upgraded because we are at the end of life today for PHP seven dot for lots of concerns in the chat. And you know, what's your biggest concern about upgrading to PHP eight, we'd love to hear from you. There in the chat. I'm dropping in our link bundle again that has today's slides, and the replay link for when we wrap up today. If you want to go back and rewatch or share you'll be able to do that. The chat log will be there, the captions will be there or that the transcript will be there. And we'd love to hear from you in the chat. The second question is What is your biggest concern about upgrading to PHP eight? Let us hear from you. They're welcome Shannon from Denver, Morocco. from Bangladesh. Welcome. So, yes, Matthew, that is the rock Tiffany. Tiffany. I have had a long good great conversation about that little piece of art. Yeah. Welcome Fern from West Virginia. Welcome, Chris from Oklahoma City. Good to see everybody today. Murray from Cozumel Deborah from Texas, Chris from Galveston. Oh Carl, you gotta upgrade on Amazon LightSail interesting. Good luck on that one. Peter from Germany. Welcome. Good to see everybody. We're just about two and a half minutes away from getting started. We're talking all about migrating your WordPress sites to PHP eight today. Welcome Jordi from Amsterdam Andrea from Italy. Welcome. As the attendee number continues to tick up, I am going to drop in our link bundle again. There you'll find today's slides and link to view the replay and get the resources after we're wrapped up Hay Day from California. John, we're going to talk about that just briefly but just a quick reminder please use the q&a in zoom to ask your questions throughout.
Welcome Michael from Cape Cod welcome guy from Tenerife class from Arkansas. Welcome everybody. We're about a minute and a half away from getting started with Tiffany bridge with the Nexus team. He's going to walk us through the process and give us some really interesting just a business perspective of upgrading to phba Vern This is a one hour webinar
one hour webinar my kids in an hour so you know I can't I can't go along.
Yeah. All right, folks, just a minute to go before we get started. Welcome everybody. If you're just joining us in zoom, pop open the chat and say hi, tell us where were you are logging in from today. Also, we'll be dropping in the link bundle once again that's got today's slides as well as the replay link to go back and rewatch or share after we wrap up today. And the check in question. What's your biggest concern about upgrading the PHP eight welcome Pierre from Montreal glad you're here
you're just about ready to begin about 30 seconds away. Magdalena already migrated to 8.1 Good. Again, welcome everybody. We're just about ready to get started with this webinar on migrating to PHP eight. And all the things you need to think about in that process. Alright, it's three minutes after so I'm gonna restart the recording and we'll get going. Well, good afternoon, everybody and welcome to another live AI iThemes Training webinar. My name is Nathan Ingram. I am the host here at iThemes Training and today I am joined by Tiffany bridge. Tiffany is the product manager for WordPress e commerce at Nexus and Tiffany is going to talk through the process today of upgrading your WordPress site to PHP a to welcome to iThemes Training Tiffany how's things going in your world today?
Things are great. You know we've got a PHP 7.4 Going on end of life today. So we Yeah, this is a timely topic and I've been spending a lot of time thinking about it just you know at work. So excited to talk about it with all y'all.
Yeah, for sure. So it's PHP 7.4 reaches end of life today. What does end of life mean? And what impact does that have really on those of us that Manage websites? No end
of life really means that the PHP project is no longer going to be releasing like security updates and things like that. They're no longer going to be like backporting features and things to PHP 7.4 It means all of their development effort is going to be like full steam ahead towards the eight dot x branch branches. And so you know, that doesn't mean that your websites are gonna stop working tomorrow. It doesn't mean anything like that. What it does mean is that it will be PHP 7.4 is increasingly going to be considered like legacy technology and eventually your web hosts are going to want to drop support for it because having an unsupported system on their on their infrastructure is problems for them. And so they're eventually going to be pushing everybody to to move. And so when that happens that always comes with a lot of headaches, right? Like that always comes with like, you know, people are saying, Oh, I updated the site and broke everything. Well there you know, there are technical problems to fix. And that means there are really business problems, which is something that we're going to talk about today.
Yeah, so Tiffany, you've been working with WordPress for quite a long time even from the client services side,
right? That's true. That's true. I have been with I have been working with WordPress for 18 years like it is possibly one of the most lengthy and meaningful relationships of my adult life. So so for those of y'all who are now doing the math that means I started I built my first WordPress website in 2004. WordPress was about 18 months old at that point. It was right around WordPress 2.0. I think maybe a little bit before that. Yeah. So and I have worked good. No, continue. Sorry. Oh, you know, I've worked as a freelancer, you know, kind of managing websites. For clients. Sometimes there were websites that I built myself sometimes there were websites that I inherited from other developers. I am not a developer by the way, like I am definitely like an implementer builder kind of person. I know how to like install the WordPress configure the WordPress, manage the WordPress but like, if you give me a list of things that have to get done at the command line, I'm like, Okay, I have to figure out how to do this again. Ask me how to like how to you know, just push that up through GitHub. Okay, I gotta figure that out. And you know, right now I'm a product manager at Nexus but I think possibly the most relevant thing is that when I was working more on the client services side, we actually did have to do this migration with our clients. We were talking about, like 200 websites at the time, where we just had to kind of buckle down and get them all upgraded. And it was a little bit of a manual process, but I have been through it. So so I'm not speaking from a lack of from, you know, from a theoretical perspective.
Yeah, very good. And that's what I'm excited about today. There. This is really more I think you have a slide even I don't want to get ahead of your slides. But this is really a business process issue more than a tech issue in some ways, right? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I don't want to steal your thunder sock, keep talking. But that's what I'm excited because a lot of the folks that are on our, in our audience and on this call are folks that Manage websites for clients. And so we're going to really be dealing with this from a business, a business process perspective first, and I'm excited about that. Let me do a few housekeeping details and I'll turn it right over to Tiffany and we'll get underway. At first just a quick note. This is maybe a shorter presentation today. But plenty of time for q&a, which we thought would be very helpful for those of you that are joining us. So the chat is open. So if you're just joining us in zoom, pop up in the chat and say hi and tell us where you're logging in from today. I've dropped a few links in the chat that contains today's slides. If you'd like to download the deck that you see on your screen, you may do that now. Also, there is a replay link there in the chat that gives you access about an hour after we wrap up we'll have all those things live where you can rewatch the webinars share that link with others everything that is mentioned in the chat log will also be there in case there's any helpful thoughts or links that others share that'll be available for you as well as the transcript will be downloadable as well there on that replay page. I will ask please if you have questions you can ask those at any time please use the q&a link. That is there. In the Zoom toolbar pop that open if you'd like to and right now you can see there's already several questions that have been asked. Get your question in anytime you'd like and then use the little thumbs up icon to upvote the questions of others because when we get to our time of q&a, I will be taking those order questions in the order of the upvotes they have received. So feel free to ask away upvote questions of others and we'll have a good discussion after Tiffany finishes her presentation. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to you Tiffany let's get started.
Alright, Hi, buddy. Like I said, I've been doing this a long time. I've been through this process already once so I kind of the biggest point that I want to hit with y'all today. And Nathan already kind of alluded to it is like this is not a technical problem. Right. Like there's a technical aspect of this problem. But it's not a technical problem. This is a business problem. Because, you know as we're seeing in the chat from people expressing their concerns, you know, it's not just that, you know, something might break, it's who's gonna fix it, right? Do I have to pay somebody to fix it? Is it going to cost money to fix it? How old are these sites? Okay, this is these are business questions. There are people out there there are plenty of people out there who have the expertise to fix whatever has gone wrong. They can be had that expertise can be had for a price. Is that a price that you can pay? We don't know how big is the problem? Do you know how big that problem is for you? And that's going to be kind of what we talked about today. This is all very but this is all very doable. And I want you to not panic. I want you to think of this as a big, like it feels like this big undifferentiated mass of stuff. And I want you to think of it as a bunch of different buckets that you can kind of put sites into and then just address the actual problems that are in front of you. Okay. So the procedure is really simple, right? spin up a staging site if you don't have one already. Ideally, you are all as WordPress professionals working with staging sites with their clients already. If you are not, I would like to ask you to consider why not because that's going to be your best play. That's gonna be your best you can break anything you want on a staging site and no one cares. Staging sites are amazing, even if you have to like spin them up temporarily and then take them back down because of limitations on your hosting plan, whatever. You've got to you've got to start from staging if you if at all possible and when I say staging, I don't mean like local on your computer because I don't think that's a great way to duplicate the environment that the site is really running in. Ideally, you're going to do this and like on a staging site at your web host. A lot of web hosts have like one click staging if yours doesn't question your web host but even if they don't, it's easy enough to just copy a site and like you know, take like an all in it. Take a copy of your of the site and put it into a fresh WordPress so you can play around with it. Okay, so that's step one. Step two, switch the staging sites environment to PHP 8.1 Look, this is a button in most cases, right? It's like a drop down, go from 7.4 to 8.1. If you can't do a point one like if you find as we as you get through the steps that 8.1 is maybe too far ahead and you have to drop back to a point oh, you can but if you can get your sights to 8.1 You're just gonna buy yourself more time before you have to do this. Again. So I recommend it if you can, and then click through the site front end and WP admin to verify the features are working. And if they're not just write down anything that's broken and any error messages that you see update things because maybe the plugin developers have already updated it. Maybe the theme maybe the original theme developer has done that. You know, update whatever you can just but then like, you know, put it in a spreadsheet like this site has these problems, because you're gonna need this comprehensive list later. Jumps Yep, so, but if everything's working, just go ahead and update it, just go ahead and update the live site. You just still want to do that check, of course, but you know, just go ahead and update it. This just to kind of give you a sense of like how easy this is, if you haven't tried to do this yet. This is what it looks like in the Nexus portal. A lot of y'all are going to be in cPanel so it'll look different but it really is like it's a drop down, you just click the different option in the in the drop down and you click Update. It's fine. It's very easy. And we get it next we actually run a compatibility check before we update anything, which can be very helpful. But if that isn't available to you through your hosts, you can you know, there are plugins and things like that that you can that you can use that are very helpful. Like I believe there's actually a WordPress compatibility like PHP compatibility checker plugin that you can use that will actually tell you where all the problems are, which is helpful as well. But really, this is as I said, this is a business problem. This is a business problem. It's a problem of prioritization. You have to think about all the sites that you have and start breaking them up into chunks, right. There's just different buckets to go in. And like you know, a lot of people have said here some of the sites that you have are old. Some of them maybe you inherited from someone else and you didn't build them and maybe the person who built them made choices that you don't necessarily care for or agree with. Maybe some of those choices were poor. Maybe some, but maybe some of your sites are newer and you have that like preferred tech stack. So here's the questions that we're asking ourselves how old and therefore likely to have problems with PHP eight or the site's I migrating get yourself a list of your sites. kind of divide them up a little bit. Think about that. Which customers are still paying me or are willing to pay me to fix those problems. If you are if you are somebody who charges your customers like a monthly care plan, I know that's a popular business strategy. You know, those people are still paying you and they're paying you with the expectation that you're just gonna handle this for them. You might have customers in your hosting and your hosting account who are no longer actively paying you and you're just still hosting them. Are they willing to pay you to fix these kinds of problems? Thirdly, what's my mix of old sites rescued from other admins sites? I built myself and so built before I knew what I was doing. I said that more nicely in the slide. But as you get on, you know, kind of through your business, like maybe you standardize on something, maybe you've standardized on a particular theme framework plus, like, I don't know Elementor maybe you've standardized on Astra maybe you've standardized on Divi what happens to the sites that that you built or that you are responsible for from before you made those decisions in your business? Right? So basically, what that gets to is like how many of your sites basically are going to have the same problems versus which ones are going to have special different problems that you have to deal with? And how long do I have before my host starts forcing the issue. Eventually your host like I said is going to want to get 7.4 off their systems and they are going to make you upgrade and then you are not going to have a choice. So you want to get ahead of that because what you don't want is next week, we're forcibly upgrading all your sites to PHP 8.1. And you've still got 20 sites that haven't been dealt with. So you really want to get ahead of those things. So bucket one low hanging fruit. These are your like recently built sites where you already know things are already good or you go through and you're testing them and everything looks good. Just move them just move them pat yourself on the back for how proactive you're being. Okay. You are going to have some sites where these were this is not a big problem. Just move them and then you're that's that's makes your whole problem just that bit smaller, right? Then you're ahead of them and you can just move on and you sleep a little better at night. Number two sites with similar problems sites that have the same incompatibility problems like a common plugin or theme, theme framework that hasn't yet been updated. We all know that the problem with this is not WordPress itself, right? It's gonna be themes and plugins. Well, if you are somebody who uses like the same five or six plugins on every site, you might have 10 sites that have this problem, but it's really just one problem, right? Like it's just one problem. So you can follow up with that with that plug in developer and say, Okay, so do you have a roadmap for when you're going to fix this? If we you are using plugins that have like a business model behind them, and developers are getting paid to solve these problems, then this is probably on their radar and you can ask them, when do they expect to have to have their PHP work done. And then you will know when you can solve these problems. So that's really important to keep on your radar is like, it might be 10 sites, but it might really just be one problem that all 10 sites have. And that's that's another kind of thing then you now you know, the size and the scope of that problem, like okay, you just need one particular plugin to update or two particular plugins update, and then these sites are off the list. You can upgrade them it's fine. bucket number three, the problem children, right. This is I would define this as any site where you cannot rely on someone else fixing the compatibility issue for you on an acceptable timeline. So you have to act. That strategy. I mean, you can there's a number of things you can do here you can hire somebody to fork an old plugin, or submit pull requests to open source plugins to update your themes. You can do that. You can also dig into replacing problem plugins with alternate solutions. But when you're doing that, because these these these solutions cost money, right so you have to ask yourself, does your relationship with these clients justify the time and expense? Is this company? Is this client still gonna pay for it? Is this client gonna pay you to do this? Can you pitch another project to them, right? Is this a way to generate new business? Can you pitch a project for the update? Or are you just stuck? Like you just know that they're gonna make this your problem? And then you have to decide whether you're going to continue that relationship with the client. If you decide to fire the client, are they going to bad mouth you like these? I call this bucket the problem children for a reason, right? It's because there's not an easy answer here.
Clearly in the short term, you're gonna have to keep them on the existing PHP, but you can't kick that can down the road forever. So this is where you really need to start thinking about strategies for getting things fixed. And unfortunately, like if you don't have if you don't personally have the skills like I don't have to, to update whatever the tech is to use PHP eight yourself, right? Like you're not gonna recode that plug in, you're not gonna to submit those pull requests like, you won't have to pay somebody to do it for you. This will also be a great opportunity to like reach out into your network of fellow WordPress professionals and see if anybody else is having a specific same problem. Can you all pitch in to have something forked and updated? Do you have do you have like overlapping problems where like the same person could pay to fix it like the same person could fix it for all of you? And it's worth like splitting that cost? But really, it's important to like chase after this as a business issue, right? Because a lot of these plugins like some of these plugins are abandoned because they were only ever done by like a volunteer, plugin developer and that person doesn't have the time or the inclination to keep up with it. Right? Has that person's not gonna go back to it and you can't make them because it's not really their job to? It's was it's not their business. It's hanging on and it's your business. So I think those are kind of the important questions you need to ask yourself like this is a business priority for you, but it's not necessarily a business priority for the person who's best position to fix it for you. So how are you going to change that situation? And this is truly my last slide. And so when we said that it was gonna be a short presentation, we meant it. Now is a great time to get back into that q&a, because I think what we can find is that a lot of you kind of have the same questions. So let's just talk through them together. Oh, and I'm also seeing in the chat who's the picture behind me that is Dwayne The Rock Johnson. I have been a two foot by two foot oil painting of Dwayne The Rock Johnson behind me. He comes to my meetings with me.
All right, so it's a great overview of a process to think through how to move my clients over to PHP dot A, we have a bunch of questions 17 that have been asked in the chat. I knew that was going to happen. I wanted to make sure we have plenty of time plenty of time to answer these questions. So if you have a question is you've been listening and thinking through this process, and you would like to get some feedback on please use the q&a in the Zoom icon bar to pop that window open. Also, just take a quick minute to scan through the questions that have been asked. And if you would like to see that question answered, just press the thumbs up icon. And that will upvote that question, and we will take these questions now in order of their up votes. So I'm actually going to exercise host prerogative and skip down a little bit to a question that was asked by Nate. That had to do with a warning message from iThemes Security pro Nate says that when he upgraded to pro upgraded the site to eight dot o he got an error stemming from something in the debug dot php file. And Nate I just slacked Timothy Jacobs, the lead developer of I think security and he assures me that is a false positive. There's nothing wrong there. Nothing to worry about. So he's all over that he's aware of it. They're not quite I don't have a reason for why it's a false positive, but it isn't. There's nothing to worry about there. So hopefully that is
helpful. When if you're and also on that if you are worried about in the meantime about that, like filling up your debug log at your host like that. Is something that your host maybe can help you with is is log management and maybe excluding that from logs. I would definitely open a ticket with your host to see about just not having like logs full of that false positive message that they should be able to help you with. Ideally, they should be able to help you with Yeah.
All right, so first question from John. Tiffany. Is there an easy way to find out if there are any plugins that are not yet compatible with PHP eight?
In my opinion, the easiest way to do this the easiest way to do this is to just like, like I said, spin up those staging sites, upgrade them, like, you know, upgrade whatever's on them, and then just flip the staging site environment to PHP eight. And when I say eight, I really do mean 8.1. Somebody else asked that question farther down. If you go to 8.1 versus 8.0, you're just putting you're putting off the time before you have to do this again. So always try to jump as far ahead as you can. And then like if 8.1 isn't for you, then knock back to 8.0. I think the easiest way to do it is just to upgrade some sites and see and see what happens. Um, the other thing you can do is if you already know that you use a lot of the same plugin you can go dig around in their support forums, or check on their roadmap, like you know, their blog, their roadmap, just to see like is PHP eight on the roadmap? Check the release notes for the plugin for the version that you're using has PHP eight support been added? That'll usually be in your change log. I don't think there's like a simple automated way. To do that across your entire fleet of sites. But I think you can get a sense of it pretty quickly, especially if you use a lot of the same plugins on every site. But I truly think the best way to do it is just that real world like flip the site environment to PHP eight and see what breaks nothing. Yay. If something well, maybe there's some there's some follow up you need to do.
Yeah, and so there's something that as far as our process on the agency side, what I what I think we'll be doing as we flip the switch, which we haven't done yet, but we will very soon probably I'm thinking look at looking at the error log in the root of the WordPress site, maybe clearing that. And then what as you're clicking through the site to test it, then maybe go back and look at that error log. What do you think about that?
I think that's a great strategy. The other thing you can do on a staging site is turn on debug mode. And then you'll get error messages on the front end as well. You can do that with a line of code in the WP config file. And then and then you can see it visually. But of course the other thing is like as we know, a lot of like the PHP 8.1 errors are like just deprecated functions and things like that, that don't affect the operation of the site and really all they're gonna do is like fill up your logs. So I think that's, I think that's important, that I think is important is like, is the site really going to break if you update it to PHP 8.1 And there's just a question of log management for a little while, you know, because I really do think that the best thing that all of us can be doing is getting all the way up to 8.1 if we can, because otherwise you could be doing this like every year and that sucks. Like don't do that to yourself. You have a business to run your time is money.
Yeah. And that's that's really interesting, and I love what you just said about, you know, if you if you if you're building with the same plugins that makes this process a lot easier, and it's actually this week, we're doing our premium course for November on iThemes Training tomorrow and Wednesday, and I'm teaching people how to build a site built based on a base site with a common theme and plugin stack. It makes management easier. And you know, this way, for example, if I look at all the sites we manage on our agency side, they're probably it least have me I'm making up a number here, but I would say at least half of them are the same themes and plugins. So with those kinds of sites, you know, if I put those in a bucket like you're suggesting, we test one of those then probably asterisk we're safe to just go ahead and upgrade the rest of them right. Is there am I missing something?
I mean, I think it's always a good idea to check every individual site right like these, your clients are paying you to keep them online. It's always worth like for every site, even if they're all using the same sets of things. It's always worth it to test it on a staging site, click around make sure everything's working and then upgrade. I think it's worth doing that. I think it's worth that discipline. But yes, I would say that if you if you get through, like if you're building on that same core, you know, you're gonna get through two or three of them and you're going to start to feel like you're moving a little faster because, you know, like that you're not really having the huge problems and you know, like, Okay, well, this site has a calendar and this site doesn't have a calendar. So over here, I'd better check on the calendar, right? Or this site has this feature that this other one doesn't have, you know, go check on that because you know, like the theme itself is mostly fine everywhere else. I think that you know, the more like, consistency and commonality you have, the better off you are like the when I was doing client services, I was with a group that was doing like, like highly bespoke themes. For every single client we had the you know, team of developers and so everything I started from like underscores and then was built kind of from the ground up there. There wasn't like a Genesis, there wasn't a Divi. So that in some ways was a lot harder for us, but also easier in the sense that the person who wrote the code was still sitting there and we still had all of their you know, we still had access to them. So it just kind of depends on like, what your resources are available. But yeah, I think the more like consistency you have from one site to the next easier this process is going to be for
you. Yeah, for sure. Dave's question is up next to we jumped to 8.1 versus just going to eight I think you've said yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Right?
Do that if you can? Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. So
and by the way, we talked about this in our news roundup last Tuesday, the PHP 8.2 release has been pushed off a little bit. I think it's not going to be live until the first of the year or something like that. Let's see a question here from Paul in the past there was a plugin that identified issues with upgrading to the next version of PHP, is that available for eight and I think that was the PHP compatibility checker. That WP Engine created for PHP seven that he's talking about,
and I think someone said that that is not recommended for use anymore now. But so I couldn't I can't answer that off the top of my head unless you want to just stop and start Googling together. Investigate. Yeah, that is the kind of thing that like, you know, like WP Engine created that contributed back to the community. It's great if we like I would actually really love to see that continue to be maintained, but I don't know like like, I don't know enough about, like politics behind that. And who was involved in and all that to be able to tell you if there is something right now.
Right? Yeah. So in that the PHP compatibility checker works really well to determine compatibility with PHP seven. doesn't help us much with
a Yeah, yeah. So and I don't know, like, like I said, I don't know who is if WP Engine is going to continue to have that take that work on. I don't know if they're going to continue to do that. And if not, if somebody else is going to fork it and continue on, I just, I don't have an answer for that. But that is another area where like, you know, a couple of like enterprising WordPress professionals could maybe pool resources and get somebody to fork that and update it for them possible. And then you can either contribute that back to the community or keep it for yourself, that's not a very open source thing to say, I don't recommend it. But, you know, I'm not here to tell you how to run your business either. So it would be great if somebody if somebody were to take that on and I think you know, if if volunteering, excuse me, if volunteering developer time isn't something you can do, you know, kind of ask yourself, like, what level of commitment you know, what level of resources can I put into this? And maybe you have like three or four friends who can who can pitch in with you to kind of save everybody some time.
Yeah, for sure. And Elizabeth, I did see your question there in the chat. I'm gonna I've got that on my external list here. We'll get that answered by Tiffany, I think who I think can speak to that exact issue a little bit. Okay, question from Sue is, is there any information about common things that break like major plugins or themes that you're aware of?
I haven't seen a ton of talk about like, well, we all know that such and such a thing is broken. First of all, I think probably because none of these major plugin developers want to be on a list like that. So like, again, like I would say, like for these like big ones that like everybody uses like your advanced custom fields and things like that, like there's probably already like a published some sort of published information about what their phpa roadmap is, right? Like, even if they're not compatible today. They'll be able to tell you when they anticipate being compatible, hopefully, right. And if not, ask them, ask them. Have you done this? Like if you don't see it in their change log, ask them have you done this? And when are you going to do especially Oh, especially if it's a if it's a plugin you're paying for? Like you're paying for that you're paying them right? Because remember, this is like WordPress, right? So you pay not so much for the actual software that you're downloading but for the the continuing updates and support, right? Well, you're paying for that. Make sure you know what you're getting for that right and I'm not I have many wonderful co workers in the plugin space and I adore all of them. But and not even a but and they need to hear from their customers that this is important. If you don't feel like this is their putting this at the level of priority that you would like them to. You can politely communicate that to them. Don't be a jerk to your plugin developers. Yeah, but do like politely and firmly tell them what is our priority for you?
Yeah, yes. Good. Good advice. Here's a good question from Dave, is there really a large risk and staying with 7.4?
I mean, a risk, like a risk over what time horizon right, somebody else asked, Well, is there a risk to putting enough till the end of the week? Now just you know, I'm not saying you have to jump off this webinar and go do this right now. Right I'm saying you want to do this, you know, soon. Like later this week. Amazing. Do you have if you do this, if you take this information, you go start working on this by the end of the week, I will be so thrilled, right? The risk is more on like kind of a longer term timescale right because since there's not going to be any more PHP seven develops, that means that there's going to be like as security issues are discovered with language, things like that. Those are not going to those are not going to be fixed. Also, like you're going to run into situations like like something that I see, you know, working on the hosting side is that the longer you stay on technology that is no longer being supported, the greater and greater risk you run, that if something like if something goes wrong with the server you're on, the lower the greater your risk that it can't be put back the way it was, right, because you may not be able, your host may or may not be able to find a server on which to install the specific things you were using. And that is that is a serious problem. Because like every web server, right, it's like it's not just like one thing, it's a million little packages and stacks of things. And so it's important to kind of stay up not necessarily with the bleeding edge, but kind of with the current, the current common support commonly supported versions, because you never know when something when it's interaction with something else is going to break. So I would say over time, the risk becomes greater and the risk to your clients becomes greater. But in terms of like immediate there's I'm not talking about like a zero day like if you wait till the end of the week, or even next month, or like after the holidays to do this, like it's fine. Like don't don't panic, but but it is something that like you want to you, I would say you should start working on this in the next, I don't know, two to three months. Before you know, ideally you would work on it sooner than then but if you're like if it's the holidays, things are difficult. You know, it's a it's a high shopping time of year. So if you've got customers that that rely on stores, like have like e Commerce on their sites, maybe now's not a great time to touch their sites. You know, if you put this off to like January, okay, okay. Just make sure that you know that you're doing that you're planning to have to do that. Yeah,
for sure. It's interesting to me how it seems like this happens every year. There's some sort of major release or major thing that has happened. It's right around the holidays. I've never quite understood why we couldn't just push end of life off to say January you know, after the holidays and you know, that sort of thing.
I'm sure there's a you know, I I agree with you. I also feel like it's because it's precisely because, in my opinion, because it's the holidays like at Nexus we have a moratorium on new code. Starting like mid November, right? We have code freeze, because we are a host that specializes in E commerce which means we are not trying to touch anything. That's a customer environment starting from about mid November, till about the second week of January. We just don't want to touch it then. And so I think I think everybody is subject to kind of those same rhythms right like there are holidays, the people maintaining PHP want to celebrate them. You know, that kind of thing. I think it's I think they're all subject to the same rhythms we are and if we don't want to work in December, neither do they. Yeah, so yeah.
And Stacy makes a fair point to this PHP eight was released two years ago and this this has been a published date, not just human nature, though, says we wait until the end of life to make the swap. Anyway, let me move on
to that same question about is there a danger to staying? And it's because like, okay, you've already say two years, how much longer are you going to stay? Because your thing you all have customers. We all have clients who will refuse to put one more red cent into their website until they absolutely must, and they have no choice. Well, those are problem clients. And it is part of your responsibility as their web professional, to advise them on why that's a bad idea. You can lead the horse to water and you can't make them drink but you can tell them about the consequences of dehydration. Right? And then you can save those emails to us later when they come to you and complain that you didn't warn them about it. You can bring out the receipts. I'm a big believer in receipts receipts like from CVS like long receipts if you have to.
All right, next question here is from Robert and Elizabeth. I'm gonna roll your question. And this is well, Roberts question is with nexcess managed WordPress hosting, will the upgrade be done for him by Nexus? And I'll just pause there and let you answer that and I'll come back to Elizabeth question.
We are not typically going to do that for you like I can imagine some sort of situation in the future. When we're ready to just like remove PHP 7.4 from our environments altogether, and then the upgrade will get done for you because it's it's just gonna have to but then but at that point, it's like okay, but we aren't doing any of the like checking to see if it's compatible. We're not doing it. We're just doing it and so if you if you want to control what happens and on what timeline and whether everything is fixed first you are going to do that yourself.
Alright, so along that same line Elizabeth has been describing a situation in the chat about she is currently under the legacy liquid web Managed WordPress, which was something that existed prior to Nexus coming into the picture and Nexus is really the liquid web brand that handles managed WordPress applications. She's saying they won't she can't upgrade upgrade under liquid web to PHP eight. They don't support it in the industry. They're saying she has to migrate to Nexus but then they can't let her know when that's going to happen. Is there anything any advice you can give her about
that? Yes. So we have as you probably know, Elizabeth, that we have been migrating people kind of kind of in cohorts right like and your turn is going to come up. Here's the thing, you don't have to wait for us to do it. If you want to get this done today right now. You can open a ticket for a migration kind of through our normal process. We have like a normal like if you're migrating to us from any host we have like a white glove migrations team that's available to you and that's available to you for free you can also self migrate which is where you stand up the plan on Nexus and just you know, you start up a WordPress there and then you use our like migrate to liquid web and Nexus plugin to move things over and that's it's the same plugin a lot of hosts have it's like the front end for like the blog vault migration service that works really really well. And so you can certainly migrate it yourself the main advantage to waiting for the and you can decide for yourself how much of an advantage this is right? The the what you're gonna get from waiting for, like net liquidweb nexus to migrate you is that they are working on making sure that people have like equivalent plans like an equivalent plan from moving from one host to the other. But if that isn't like a financial concern for you, or you find that like one of the kind of out of the box Nexus plans that are available on our website works for you. There's absolutely no reason you have to wait for that you can do that yourself. And you are and or you can you know open up a ticket for kind of our standard migrations team and then they'll get in touch with you. Good.
Let's see Stacy would like to know if liquid web or Nexus has a compatibility check tool.
Nexus does have a compatibility Checker tool. I see another question in the chat where somebody suggests that maybe the the information that was given to him by that compatibility Checker tool wasn't entirely accurate and I want to hear more about that. Let's talk about that offline. Dave Brown because I want to make sure that I circulate that feedback up to the right team but we do Nexus has a compatibility Checker tool when you let me run back to the slide where I showed our portal Come on. But it says here in the in the green box before we make the change. We'd like to run a compatibility check to make sure your site won't have any issues. What that does is it puts your site into a queue and it runs a compatibility checker and then in about five or 10 minutes, it'll spit out a report showing you what what it's found. And then that can help you make the decision about like okay, is that plugin really necessary? Or is that something I should have cleaned up a long time ago? Is that something that you know, like, Am I worried about that problem or not? But we do have that?
Very good. Let's see. So, in that what you're just showing there that's built into the Nexus platform that's not a WordPress plugin, someone can install a WordPress
plug in this is this is a Nexus tool available from the Nexus portal. All right, let's see.
Next up is Sherry. How long do you think we can kick the can down the road? Yeah, sorry, answer this already. So Sherry, she was saying, maybe you can wait. Yeah, do it as soon as you can. But if it's January, probably the world's not going to end right. Before you did this upgrade. Yeah, I mean, obviously you want to make sure and you're watching news where you know, next week if there's a major exploit with PHP 7.4 You know,
for sure, keep up on that. And definitely like this is also a great time to ask like when when's the quiet period for your client? Right? Because some of your not all of your clients are going to be like E commerce places, right? Some of them are going to be like regular old like Office, folks where like they're going to be maybe it's going to be kind of quiet for them in December in December is a great time to do it. Or maybe December's completely crazy for them and they absolutely cannot you absolutely cannot let anything change on their website until January. Like ask those questions about your clients as well. You know, what are their needs? But yeah, I wouldn't like if you can't get to it like today like don't lose sleep over this. This is not this is not to lose sleep over it kind of thing. You just want to make sure that you're prioritizing this in the next couple of months.
Yeah, for sure. Great question here from Shannon. So if something happens, can you roll back to PHP seven for
as long as your host continues to have it You sure can. If stuff breaks, like if you if you roll a site forward to 7.4. And it looks ok to you. And the next day, your client is like oh my god, something is extremely broken. You absolutely can roll it back to 7.4 and see if that fixes it. You've just identified a new problem you need to solve because you still have to get that site off a 7.4 but it is just as easy to roll it back to 7.4. Like this is this is a non destructive. It's non destructive in the sense that anything that gets broken by upgrading to set to eight is gonna get Unbroken by rolling back.
Yeah, that's a great, great way to put it. And it's simple as just what Tiffany is showing there. Drop down the pick list and choose 7.4. If you're in a C panel environment, it's the same way I shared a screenshot earlier of how to do that in the multi PHP manager in cPanel. Same thing you just flip it right back to 7.4 and it just takes a second for that to reload on the site and you're good to go. So it's very, very simple to change to 8.1 and to revert back to seven dot whatever.
I just really want to convey that fear of things breaking is not a reason to not start this process. It's a reason that it might that the time horizon for finishing it might stretch out a little longer and it's a reason why finishing it for good might end up costing you a little bit of money of money depending on what's broken. But fear of things breaking is not a reason to not start because I think possibly less is going to break than you think. Gotcha
let's see, there's a question here from an anonymous attendee about what to do if the website breaks, whoever that is, if you could give me a little more detail on the chat. I'm not quite sure what the question is here. I'm happy to ask I just need some more detail. So if you wouldn't mind just providing a bit more of that either in another question or in the chat that would be helpful. Next up is Ben. Ben says is this a good way to test the upgrade by adding this if module code to the htaccess file? Are you able to see that Tiffany?
I see it that is outside of my area of expertise. Me too. I've been I think I wish I could answer that. Question for you. Yeah,
Ben, I think what's going on there. I think that if module is what actually tells the server to use PHP on that particular site, so you by adding that I think you are actually upgrading to PHP eight, I think, but I could be wrong in which
case, sure. It's basically the same thing. And you'll you'll know right away if something breaks, but it's not a great way to to test if it's compatible for breaking things.
Yeah, yes, Matt. It's what Matthew saying in the chat, that that if module is what tells Apache your web server to use PHP eight on that website. So basically, that code that you're adding to htaccess is what the interface here like we're looking at in excess or with the multi PHP manager in cPanel. That's what it's just adding that line. It's just a friendly way to do that. So there you go. You can do it that way, rather than the UI but either way. Okay. Paul is asking, What would you would you consider this an upgrade charge for a maintenance client? If you're managing a site on a regular basis, would you include this or would this be a fee?
I mean, I feel like if, if it goes well, I would not charge someone for this. Personally, I feel like this is if it goes well. That's part of what they're paying you for in the maintenance fee, right? Because if it goes well, this is like a five minute operation. If things break, then that's where it starts. To get hairy, right? Because then the question becomes, why did it break? what's broken? What's it going to take to fix it? Is it broken because a customer insisted on using a particular product that now is breaking? Is it broken? Because it's something that's in your particular stack? You kind of have to gauge like, you have to engage at that point, like, who is causing the work to be who is causing the work, right, like, like I would never charge somebody to fix something that I broke with through my own decision making right like, I feel like that's on me. But there's also a reason that I'm not a freelancer anymore. So you know, like, maybe it just wasn't out for it maybe. So I think that it really depends on kind of like the relationships that you have with your clients. What the what is the specific thing that broke if it's like an ancient site that you didn't even build and you just inherited it from somebody. And now like that previous site builders, bad decisions are coming back to haunt you. Yes, absolutely. Pitch that as a as an upgrade project, make them pay 100% But like for those kinds of like squishy in the middle of questions, like you kind of have to decide like, is it like put yourself in your customers shoes, does this feel like something they should have to be paid for? I can't answer that for you in every case, every case is going to be highly, highly different based on context. Yeah,
I agree. I mean in general, this if for clients who are on one of our care plans on the agency side, this is this is not something we would charge separately for. But if we're managing, you know, for some reason, we don't do this. But if you're managing a site that you don't host, then yeah, or if you're not if you're hosting a site or people have you doing work ala carte, I would definitely charge for this. Yeah. Okay. There's an interesting question in the chat regarding a message and I've lost it. Things move right. It's from Nate. He uses the Nexus panel and when he tried to compatibility check in 8.1 It showed him the message. PHP eight one is not currently fully supported by WordPress, your site may experience issues proceed at your own risk. Can you speak to that at
all? That's boilerplate just based on like the current status of like, I think 8.1 support is still technically listed. As beta and WordPress. Yeah. And so like that's just a saying like, that's honestly like, don't freak out just turn it back and don't like come yell at our support text for it. Like you know, WordPress itself is not necessarily advertising full support for this yet. So yeah, it's boilerplate. It's not a reason to not at least try it. But it is an argument for doing it on a staging site at first. Yeah, but if you did a staging site and everything went well, I don't think there's any reason to not try it out on your live site.
Yeah. So I've dropped the link in the chat to a post on the make WordPress blog, the core blog that shows the the items that are remaining for compatibility, and it's tiny stuff, it's down to just a few things that are not highly functional, but nevertheless, they are still there and they might produce a little error. These are going to be likely things that I mean, from my perspective that don't impact the front end. It's probably not going to be an issue but just be aware. Yeah. Okay, next up. Let's see. Okay, so here's some more clarification to that anonymous question. So if you tell your client that PHP you know, the their PHP needs to get updated but then they drag their feet and giving you permission, what happens? You know, what would you tell how would you handle that with a client Tiffany?
Like, they don't want you to upgrade? Um, so I feel like when you have a client who's like dragging their feet on the upgrade, I would basically send them politely, but over time, a series of increasingly alarmed messages like, this is now x months out of date. This is now why months out of date, this has now why years out of date, and then eventually you're gonna start saying okay, if something happens like we cannot be responsible for this because we have advised you, you can start doing things like asking them to, to acknowledge that you know that they are doing this against your advice, like you know, like if you check yourself out of a hospital before your doctor says you're ready to go, they make you sign a form that says you you check yourself out against medical advice. Like we can learn from that right you want to you want to make it you just you can't like I said you can't make a client do anything they don't want to do. But you can lay the groundwork for any shoot for protecting yourself on any further dispute that might arise from them ignoring your advice. Yeah, advice. And that is and that's really what we're talking about. Like you can you we all owe our clients like our very best advice, but we can't make them take it and then the question becomes like, how do you protect yourself? And that's, you know, like, we all want our clients to trust us and pay us for our expertise, and things like that. But sometimes the fact is, they don't and at that point, I would definitely be worrying about covering yourself in the event of a dispute. Yeah, you know, make sure that you're like keeping keep those emails, file them, make sure that you understand like on this date, I advise them to do this. They blew me off where they said they weren't going to move forward. You know, whatever it was. Give them your best advice and then see why. Yeah,
that's great advice. Contract is very important in that situation, communication and documenting those things super important. If I would suggest also that the version of PHP that a site is running is not a decision that should be up to the client anyway, that's, that's a security and hosting environment issue. And if you're providing management and it's your hosting environment that you're providing, I mean, just upgrade them, if it's their hosting environment. Might be a little different. But I would even say at some point, you know, at some point next year, you've got to make the decision of even saying, I can no longer manage your site. If you're not going to be on a version of PHP that doesn't receive security updates, like how can I promise to keep your site secure when the very underpinnings of the site are inherently insecure? Right? So
absolutely, you can you can content you can like they control like what they're willing to pay for pay you to do. You control what you're willing to host right? So if they're in your hosting environment like me, it's as if they're, if they're in your environment. And they are insisting like they're refusing to make the updates to their sites that would enable them to run effectively. On modern versions of PHP. At some point, you can say I can no longer hope to hear your files you have 30 days to fight to go somewhere else, because you know, like, who wants to have people who wants to do business with somebody like that? No, like not me.
Yeah, and that's where your whole original point and this Tiffany, which is the exact way to deal with this issue is this is a business these are business process issues more than technical issues. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Question from Zack, if you're using the element or Cloud Hosting, where it's all contained, is there anything I would need to do for myself and my clients?
Oh, I couldn't answer that. You'd have to ask the Elementor team. I'm not sure. I'm not sure what their back end is that they are front ending
on? I don't know either. Sorry about that. Zack. Paul's question. This is a great question. If you have a site that's already at Php eight, is it a big deal to bump up to 8.1?
I would say in most cases, probably not always worth going through the process. of checking it first, but probably not.
Yeah, I would say the same thing. Let's see Nate would like to know at some point in the future would Nexus consider providing a bulk conversion button where we can check a bunch of sites and upgrade them all at once instead of one at a time.
That is a super great suggestion. If you go to nexus.canny.io you can make that suggestion to our product team, which includes me there. There's a lot of features I'd like to see more for kind of bulk addressing of sites in our portal than currently exist, but they require a lot of like thinking through like all the different kinds of use cases. So would we consider Yes. Is it on our roadmap? No. But it's an interesting question to think about and something that things that we are reviewing right now are like, what are the ways that we can help people manage multiple sites more effectively? At Nexus?
Yeah, very good. All right. I just dropped that link there in the chat for the Nexus feature request roadmap. You can make that suggestion there. All right. Vern has a good question here. So Red Hat, which for those of you that aren't aware is a flavor of Linux makes a big deal of only running their blast versions of everything. Any thoughts of 7.4 from Red Hat is safe for a while, maybe getting back ported from Red Hat themselves. Any ideas? Thoughts on that?
Oh, gosh, that's a great question, but I don't know the answer to that. I mean, it seems like if Red Hat's only going to is going to stick with 7.4 that introduces risk to Red Hat's and one would assume that they would be looking to mitigate that risk somehow, but I don't know enough about how they work to to be able to advise there. Yeah.
All right. Another good question here from Dave. So we've talked a lot. It started out I think with the theme security false positive message and some others like plugins that were flagged by compatibility checker and they really everything was really okay. How do we know like, what do we do when there's something flag? How do we know if it's a false positive or not? Like, what would you recommend?
So we've talked a little bit about like going through your debug logs, to see if you can find the errors, right. And see, like, is it a deprecation notice if it's a deprecation notice probably fine. Don't worry about it. Though, you do want to make sure that isn't filling up your logs. The other thing like I said is you know, click through front end and WP admin. Did you think break? Have you tried like creating content and adding it to through whatever you know, whatever feature of the site that is, is it a calendar plugin? Is it a is it a testimonials plugin is you know, whatever it is, have you tried using that feature? Under php? Eight 8.1. To see if it still works. If it still works, it still works fine. That's how I would tell like because ultimately, like what's the most important thing right? Is it the deprecation notice or is it the fact that the site's still function? So as expected, you know, that's the number one way to tell like just does this Does the site still do what you expect it to do? You don't I mean, having a kind of a QA mindset and being able to test for the edge cases and and things like that is great, but ultimately, like go through and just try using it a couple of times and see if it works. If it works. It's probably going to keep working. Yeah,
very good. I want to be mindful of time I know you have a hard stop at two o'clock. So we'll stop with questions here. Those of you that are members can feel free to ask any remaining questions. You have an office hours with me on Thursday. But for now, let's start to wrap up. Tiffany, this has been a really good overview of the process of upgrading your WordPress website to PHP eight. A lot of great questions and answers from everybody. Tiffany, any final thoughts as we're wrapping up today?
Don't be afraid move ahead boldly into the new world of PHP eight. It's gonna be okay. I know you're worried about it. It's gonna be alright. You're gonna do great.
Yep, it really will. Alright, so I've dropped in once. One and final time the link to today's slides if you'd like to download the deck that Tiffany has been showing on her screen, also the link to view the replay of this webinar along with the chat log and the transcript will be up in about an hour. At that link. I also just shared as well. So Tiffany, thanks again for being with us today. We really appreciate your expertise. I thank all of you for being with us as well. That's gonna wrap it up for us today. I'm back for members tomorrow with the building your Starter Site webinar. That's a two day event here for this this week here on iThemes Training where we go further together. Right Yep.