PHP Security and Upgrades

You might have seen a little pop-up on your CiviCRM talking about PHP 5.6.

What does this mean? In fact, what is PHP anyway?

So What is PHP

PHP is probably the most popular scripting language on the web and it is used to enhance web pages.

Any clearer? Well basically PHP sits on the server where your website is located and does some crucial work in making your site function. With PHP, we can do things like create username and password login pages, check details from a form, create forums, picture galleries, surveys, and a whole lot more. Basically, it makes everything work!

So what is the problem

CiviCRM 4.6 onwards has been using PHP version 5.6 for a while now and the security update support for this is ending... in December 2018. The next version is 7.1, bit of a jump I know, and the end of life for that is December 2019. You can check out the roadmap here:

However CiviCRM 4.6 and 4.7 are incompatible with PHP version 7.1 so will need to be upgraded to version 5.x.x

So what are we doing

Basically we are going to be upgrading all our customers to CiviCRM Version 5 before December 2018. As this is due to a security concern we will be using 1 hour from your support packages to do the work, even though this is probably going to take longer, much longer on the more complicated sites.

What if I don't want to upgrade

This isn't really an option, your data would be at a higher risk of attack and we as data processors would be culpable for this.

If you have any questions, just get in touch and we can discuss the situation.