Last month, the Magento community successfully completed the PHP 8 Compatibility Project. Contributors upgraded external dependencies, which will become available when version 2.4.3 is released. Full PHP 8.0 compatibility isn’t available yet, but developers plan to release a stable version of it to participants of the community’s beta program to allow them to test it out. The end goal of this project is to ensure that Magento remains compatible with different PHP versions in the future.
The PHP 8 Compatibility Project wouldn’t have been possible without the support of Magento enthusiasts around the globe. The passionate Magento community became a supportive environment for developers and contributors to learn, collaborate, and build something amazing together.
If you missed out on the last project, you’re invited to join in the latest Magento community initiative: the Platform Health Community Project!
Project Summary
The main objective of the Platform Health Community Project is to keep Magento integrated with the most relevant technologies and updated libraries. The idea for this project was actually raised by a contributor of the PHP 8 initiative, who said it would make sense to update all dependencies to the latest versions. This was met with great enthusiasm for 3 reasons:
- The most up to date libraries would solve common bug fixes.
- Updating dependencies would make the entire framework more secure.
- Magento developers would have access to all the latest functionalities.
Target Goals
The project managers have introduced dedicated “platform-health” branches that should be accessible for all Magento repositories. Contributors should create their own branches off “platform health,” and then use them for PRs (Pull Requests). This process ensures widespread flexibility while increasing the speed of PR deliveries
The general roadmap for the Platform Health initiative includes 4 main steps:
- Declare PHP 8.0 Compatibility for all Magento projects.
- Eliminate all dependencies that might prevent Magento compatibility with PHP 8.1.
- Update all Magento composer dependencies and built-in JS 3rd-party libraries to the latest version (eliminating them, if possible).
- Declare PHP 8.1 Compatibility for all Magento projects.
Get Involved!
You don’t have to be an expert developer to participate in this project. We welcome anyone who’d like to contribute or simply watch the process and learn from others. You can view the community’s progress on the Platform Health project board or the Platform Health PRs board.
If you’re interested in the Platform Health initiative and want to see what the Magento community is all about, please join our Slack workspace, Magento Community Engineering, and then add yourself to the #platform-health channel. We hope to see you there!
