So the word on the street is that PHP just got a major upgrade to PHP 7. This new release is not just a little tweak here or there but introduces some considerable upgrades, a result of almost two years of development from the girls and boys at The PHP Group. With almost 82% of public websites leveraging PHP on the server side, this definitely affects a whole bunch of people!
The first major update since 2004, PHP 7 has massively improved performance, with some benchmarks hitting 2-3 times better performance than PHP 5.6 running WordPress. There is also a significantly reduced memory usage. PHP 7 sees the removal of some functionalities such as PHP safe mode and magic quotes to name a few.
All this means that PHP based systems such as WordPress needed to be partially re-engineered in order to be ready for PHP 7’s release. For the last few months, WordPress Core has been getting ready and seem to have licked it at this point. The question is, are your plugins getting the same attention to ensure they remain up to date, backwards compatible and secure?