I don’t get word out from the factory floor often enough. I’ll try to do better. 

Our tech and development team worked weekends in February to upgrade LexBlog’s managed WordPress platform to PHP 7.2.

PHP is a programming and scripting language to create dynamic interactive websites. WordPress is written using PHP as the scripting language. Like WordPress, PHP is also  Open Source and used by countless developers and managed platforms, worldwide. 

Why should you and other digital publishers care about our upgrade? 

  • PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.0 are officially no longer supported by the foundation that manages PHP – this means no more updates to those versions making them a huge security hole for people still using those versions.
  • PHP 7.2 provides around a 20-25% performance bump from PHP 7.0 meaning sites will be faster and our servers can handle a greater number of inbound requests.
  • PHP 7.2 includes some nifty security benefits and as the WordPress core team pushes all of WordPress users to utilize more modern versions of PHP, these benefits will help protect passwords/emails/etc.

As reported by WordPress, only 12.6% of WordPress installations are on PHP 7.2. while around 56% are on PHP version 5.6 or older. 

This represents a huge problem for those site owners running on older versions of PHP – and another reason why lawyers and law firms should be running WordPress and any digital publishing platform on a managed platform which can seamlessly roll out upgrades just as you’d receive them on any SaaS solution. 

Thanks Jared, Scott, Angelo and Josh for another job well done.