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Re: PHP7

Posted: Wed Jun 10, 2020 5:32 pm
by tpeterson
williamt wrote:Guys you need to update to PHP 7.
See: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=15154
After Googling to find out how to get to .htaccess, I followed the instructions here: (https://www.shoutmeloud.com/how-to-edit ... -file.html) to add the Yoast SEO plugin, which, after further fumbling to locate the SEO tools tab, did allow me to fetch and alter the "56" to "7" per the second line in your post.

So now WP is happy, but Chrome still isn't. I presume that's because I need to install my own SSL certificate. Is that now supported on Sonic via one of the free SSL services? If so, which??

Re: PHP7

Posted: Fri Jun 12, 2020 9:40 pm
by tikvah
williamt wrote:Guys you need to update to PHP 7.
See: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=15154
Not a guy.

And no.

I've written about this at length and am not going to repeat myself. I'll just say that expecting customers to manually update their Wordpress sites (I have 6!) just to be able to install the latest Wordpress and then repeat the process every couple of months is insanity.

Re: PHP7

Posted: Sat Jun 13, 2020 12:00 am
by kbenson
Subject: PHP7
tikvah wrote: I'll just say that expecting customers to manually update their Wordpress sites (I have 6!)
To be clear, the expectation is to manually update a single file, per site.
just to be able to install the latest Wordpress
The alternative is that older wordpress installs might fail to work as we update the "default". There are different thoughts on this, but generally, we choose to error on the side of letting customers site continue working as they expect without intervention if they do nothing. Other services may prompt and require customers to take action to make sure it upgrades correctly (as there is no way to guarantee all plugins will work).
and then repeat the process every couple of months is insanity.
PHP seems to do a 7.X release once a year, as seen in the release history here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP#PHP_7. That's the absolute most often you should expect to have to upgrade currently, and that's assuming a very aggressive PHP version requirement from Wordpress, where they immediately obsolete the prior version of PHP for Wordpress when a newer one comes out, which I think is unlikely.

If, instead, Wordpress supports that version of PHP until support is ended for it, that would mean this PHP version would work until 28 November 2022, when it's slated to be End of Life.

I suspect it's somewhere in the middle, and that this PHP version will be supported for a 1.5 to 2.5 more years, based on PHP's release schedule. Someone that's more familiar with Wordpress's PHP versioning guidelines (if they are published) may be able to provide a better estimate. The next version of PHP seems to be 8.0, slated for December 2020.

What would you suggest as the acceptable amount of time to require a bit of manual intervention from customers (uploading a file indicating to use a new PHP version) between Wordpress updates? I suspect it's more than a year from now at minimum it will be required again, but if customers have an expectation of that being too short of a time, we definitely want to know.

Re: PHP7

Posted: Sat Jun 13, 2020 8:10 am
by ankh
a bit of manual intervention from customers (uploading a file indicating to use a new PHP version)
Wait, I thought a file needed to be edited.

A file needs to be uploaded?

File name and location, what tool to use or what command to type where to make that happen please.

It would be a great gift if someone could automate this. Find the user's websites and give us a button to click.
Kind of like WordPress does when they notify us of an available update. They can find the pages. Perhaps Sonic can?

I realize that's a lot to ask, as I started with Sonic when Sonic was a UNIX shell, and once upon a time I could use vi.

That was a long time ago, and the memory is dead.

Re: PHP7

Posted: Sat Jun 13, 2020 10:32 am
by tpeterson
kbenson wrote:Subject: PHP7

To be clear, the expectation is to manually update a single file, per site.

.... if customers have an expectation of that being too short of a time, we definitely want to know.
Since the update evidently requires simply that the version number referenced in the existing WP configuration be changed, it seems to me that WP could offer to make that change from the WP dashboard. Why don't they?

Now...about that SSL stuff...can @kbenson offer some guidance/perspective on Sonic's position w.r.t. getting rid of Google Chrome's "Not secure" site warnings? This is a major downer for us personal site users.

Re: PHP7

Posted: Sat Jun 13, 2020 12:14 pm
by tikvah
tikvah wrote: I'll just say that expecting customers to manually update their Wordpress sites (I have 6!)
kbenson wrote:To be clear, the expectation is to manually update a single file, per site.
Isn't that what I just said? I do not want to manually update a file for every single one of my sites.
tikvah wrote:and then repeat the process every couple of months is insanity.
kbenson wrote:PHP seems to do a 7.X release once a year, as seen in the release history here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP#PHP_7. That's the absolute most often you should expect to have to upgrade currently, and that's assuming a very aggressive PHP version requirement from Wordpress, where they immediately obsolete the prior version of PHP for Wordpress when a newer one comes out, which I think is unlikely.
We just went through this a couple months ago.
kbenson wrote:If, instead, Wordpress supports that version of PHP until support is ended for it, that would mean this PHP version would work until 28 November 2022, when it's slated to be End of Life.
That would not be consistent with the experience of all of us Wordpress users here at Sonic. We have been asked to do this recently and now again. Sonic used to do the PHP updates automatically and then started requiring us to do them manually. That is not acceptable to me. Do them automatically!
kbenson wrote:What would you suggest as the acceptable amount of time to require a bit of manual intervention from customers (uploading a file indicating to use a new PHP version) between Wordpress updates? I suspect it's more than a year from now at minimum it will be required again, but if customers have an expectation of that being too short of a time, we definitely want to know.
"A bit" of manual intervention is to log into our Wordpress admin, navigate to the updates page, hit the relevant buttons, wait, repeat for other upgrades, etc. For my more active sites, I'm in admin anyway and see when an upgrade is needed. For the less active ones, I try to go in quarterly or so. I am okay with this requirement.

But you're not asking for "a bit" of work. You're asking us to do pretty extreme interventions requiring special software and looking up complex instructions. So how often am I willing to do that? The answer is never.

And keep in mind that I'm an experienced user who used to telnet into my account and use UNIX and all of that, just to read my email. For years. So if I'm saying this is too much, imagine what it is like for a user without this experience, someone who is perhaps not great with computers in general, someone who just wants to write a blog.

And the cost is that there are security breaches because people can't update their Wordpress system and the plug-ins/themes that go along with it.

Plus here you are threatening us that our Wordpress installs may stop working altogether. Just because Sonic wants to focus on internet service like fiber and stop supporting the various hosting services many of us have (and pay separately for) doesn't mean any of this is okay. Seriously, It. Is. Not. Okay.

Re: PHP7

Posted: Sat Jun 13, 2020 3:10 pm
by kbenson
tikvah wrote: We just went through this a couple months ago.
...
We have been asked to do this recently and now again.
This is the same update, to my knowledge. The update to PHP 7 from a few months ago still works and we are referring people to carry out that update that are still noting problems now. Are you referring to a different PHP update? If you can point me to what you're referring to, I'll look into it.
tikvah wrote:Plus here you are threatening us that our Wordpress installs may stop working altogether.
It was never my intent to imply that with anything I wrote. What did I say that made you think that? I specifically noted that the reason why we require this manual step is to prevent old Wordpress sites from stopping working.

The goal here is to find the last impactful method of helping both groups of customers.

That said, in a reply to you regarding this issue in early March, williamt noted:
williamt wrote: I updated our oneclick installer today to install the newest version of wordpress. It also upgrades installs running older versions of wordpress to the newest version and updates their install to run php7 instead php5.x.
Did you try this? It sounds like what you're asking for, but given your recent comments, I assumed it didn't work for some reason, or you are unable to use it because of the circumstances of your sites. If it failed for some reason, we would like to know what happens, perhaps we can fix the problem to make it work correctly.

Re: PHP7

Posted: Sat Jun 13, 2020 3:40 pm
by kbenson
tpeterson wrote: Since the update evidently requires simply that the version number referenced in the existing WP configuration be changed, it seems to me that WP could offer to make that change from the WP dashboard. Why don't they?
This is something specific to the hosting platform Wordpress is on. While it's what works here, that's because of the steps we've taken to make it work. It may require different actions on other platforms, or no action, or a button press.

I believe our one-click Wordpress installer should try to update your site for you by taking care of this step. We are interesting in hearing from people that have had problems with this.
tpeterson wrote:Now...about that SSL stuff...can @kbenson offer some guidance/perspective on Sonic's position w.r.t. getting rid of Google Chrome's "Not secure" site warnings? This is a major downer for us personal site users.
Unfortunately, I believe the best way to currently support SSL on our platform is with a higher cost custom hosting package (which includes SSL configuration through the Lets Encrypt platform). This is unfortunate, as SSL encryption has become the standard for websites, but it requires additional cost and configuration for our customers and our staff.

We do have a new hosting platform in the pipeline. I'm not sure whether it addresses this or not, but I'll look into it.

Re: PHP7

Posted: Sat Jun 13, 2020 4:35 pm
by tikvah
kbenson wrote: This is the same update, to my knowledge. The update to PHP 7 from a few months ago still works and we are referring people to carry out that update that are still noting problems now. Are you referring to a different PHP update? If you can point me to what you're referring to, I'll look into it.
I did point to it above. That was how this thread restarted. The problem was "resolved" a few months ago (not really resolved but an employee did it manually as a kindness; I didn't ask). Then it started up again, hence my post. You responded to my post by telling me to manually update PHP. I'm not making this stuff up.

My post was Wed Jun 03, 2020 2:41 pm
Your reply was Wed Jun 10, 2020 4:55 pm
tikvah wrote:Plus here you are threatening us that our Wordpress installs may stop working altogether.
kbenson wrote:It was never my intent to imply that with anything I wrote. What did I say that made you think that? I specifically noted that the reason why we require this manual step is to prevent old Wordpress sites from stopping working.
"The alternative is that older wordpress installs might fail to work as we update the "default".
by kbenson ยป Sat Jun 13, 2020 12:00 am

Unless the context is otherwise, my use of "you" is plural and refers to Sonic staff.
williamt wrote:That said, in a reply to you regarding this issue in early March, williamt noted:
williamt wrote: I updated our oneclick installer today to install the newest version of wordpress. It also upgrades installs running older versions of wordpress to the newest version and updates their install to run php7 instead php5.x.
Did you try this?
Did you see my post from June 3rd in this thread? It includes a screenshot that makes it very clear that your claim that this has been fixed for months is untrue. As does your very own post on June 10th that tells us to do a manual install.
williamt wrote:It sounds like what you're asking for, but given your recent comments, I assumed it didn't work for some reason, or you are unable to use it because of the circumstances of your sites. If it failed for some reason, we would like to know what happens, perhaps we can fix the problem to make it work correctly.
I was pretty clear on June 3rd as I posted a screenshot of the error message. As for "what happened," I can't tell you, as I have no access to the back end like you do.

That said, someone has made some changes in the last couple of days. I just now checked two of my sites again so I could provide you with current screenshots and they have updated. So thank you to whoever did that.

But please stop trying to convince me that there was no problem. Do you think I saved an old screenshot and just pretended it came from June 3rd? Obviously there was an actual problem on that date. If it's resolved for good, hallelujah! But your responses are really off the mark. A simple "thank you for your report, we have now made the change so your sites will upgrade" would have been perfect.

Re: PHP7

Posted: Sat Jun 13, 2020 9:06 pm
by tpeterson
kbenson wrote:I believe our one-click Wordpress installer should try to update your site for you by taking care of this step. We are interesting in hearing from people that have had problems with this.
It wasn't working for me earlier this month when I updated WP to, IIRC, 5.4.2 because I then had to install the Yoast SEO plugin to manually edit the .htaccess file from 5.6 to 7. Perhaps it was fixed later this month?
kbenson wrote:We do have a new hosting platform in the pipeline. I'm not sure whether it addresses this [SSL] or not, but I'll look into it.
Thank you in advance for your findings on this.