Couple of questions, 'cause it seems the the PHP issue comes up a bunch.
Oftentimes, when someone’s Backlight site doesn’t work suddenly, they/we need to go to a previous version of PHP than the current one the host has upgraded to. Is it that some hosts get it right when upgrading their PHP or is it something in Backlight that isn’t working with the new PHP?
When contacting the host, what should we request?
When hosts upgrade their PHP, why don’t they include the plugins from the previous versions?
Etc,
I would appreciate anything to help me understand this.
Hi @coyotepixel, the reason to downgrade PHP version can be for a couple of reasons:
The site is running an older version of Backlight. To-date, only Backlight 5 and 6 run on the very latest versions of PHP. This may change over time as Backlight 5 gets older.
The host has broken something in their configuration in a newer version of PHP. This can be missing support for modules or some other issue such as startup errors where modules are configured multiple times by the host, or issues where modules haven’t been compiled against the new version of PHP.
The advice on downgrading PHP then is for different reasons. 1. to keep supporting an older version of Backlight, and 2. to work around configuration issues with the newer version of PHP provided by the host.
I don’t have any metrics, but the issue with misconfiguration should be the exception rather than the norm; most hosts seem to be able to provide newer versions of PHP without issue.
That’s an excellent question. I’d put it down to host’s unintentionally omitting or breaking support for modules. We don’t have unreasonable requirements and hosts should be providing the required modules in their standard set of modules.