Research: 55% of teams use outdated versions of PHP

Perforce Software, a solutions provider for enterprise teams, announced the results of its annual researchof the PHP ecosystem.

The report’s key findings relate to PHP version adoption and migration plans: Nearly 55% of respondents are using at least one end-of-life version of PHP in production.

This use of EOL PHP occurs despite the fact that 72% of respondents indicated that they had completed at least one PHP version migration in the last 12 months. Of those who noted a recent migration, more than half migrated from PHP 7.4, with the majority of respondents citing code refactoring as their top migration challenge.

“There is a recurring trend in PHP where enterprises, regardless of company profile, are struggling to keep up with PHP’s rapid release and support lifecycle,” said Zend Senior Product Manager Matthew Weier O’Phinney. “With many PHP teams understaffed and almost all teams having to prioritize new feature development over migration, it’s no wonder so many teams are falling behind.”

The report says DevOps maturity is not a silver bullet for PHP teams. Teams working with content management systems or PHP-based platforms like WordPress and Drupal continue to struggle with unsupported CMS-specific extensionsand no amount of organizational DevOps maturity can solve the problem-based ecosystem .

Deploying unsupported open source software, including languages like PHP or operating systems like CentOS, will continue to be a pain point for many businesses.

The report provides industry data and analysis of key factors influencing PHP development and management, as well as forward-looking analysis of the team’s priority initiatives and overall confidence in the PHP ecosystem.