PHP

I listened to a few downloaded youtube videos (sort of a choose your own adventure poor man’s podcast) while I was on a recent road trip. They were by Miriam Schwab, and one was about speeding up your site, (and so was this one) and a very approachable one was about securing your site. I listened to one about content security policies (and another on the WordCamp 2018 livestream Guitar track, starting at 29:02) which, full disclosure, was a little over my head. Like, not completely over but I had to stand on tiptoe. Both were good, especially since they challenge us to start thinking about ways to make our sites faster and and more secure; at the end she talks about her new company Strattic which sounds like it will do both. Or like caching, only better.

I described it to my dad thus:

Molly: Picture you could make a cardboard cutout of me, and it was ready instantly.
Dad: So we wouldn’t have to wait for you to get ready before we could leave for breakfast.
Molly: Yes.
Dad: Like, it’s just a cardboard cutout so it’s ready to go, we could just pick it up and there’s no waiting.
Molly: Yes. But also, the cardboard cutout can’t be hurt. Like, it’s impervious to stab wounds. So it’s me, it’s the latest version of me, but ready at a moment’s notice and completely secure.
Dad, interrupting: …stab wounds?!?!
Molly: What I mean is, in this example I/the website can’t be hurt. Your site is the latest version, but blazing fast because it’s also static, and un-hackable, because it’s not a living, dynamic thing.

I’m only curious about how often you’ll need to do changes – obviously on most sites pushing out a new version once a day would be more than fine. But on huge sites or membership sites it could be a problem. Also, I guess this wouldn’t work for something like membership site with a discussion board. And – I’m showing my ignorance here, but I think it would interfere with any contact forms giving confirmation messages, right?

Still, I love the elegance of the security and speed inherent in simply serving a static site. What do you think?

So I just had another client’s site have a problem, most likely from incompatibility between a plugin they needed and the version of PHP running in their hosting plan. Specifically, the Constant Contact plugin is hasn’t been updated in a while and it still has a (not unreasonable) expectation that you’re running at least PHP 5.5. For reference, PHP 5.5 was released June 20th, 2013, and was only supported up till July of 2016.

So if their hosting plan was such an old legacy plan that they weren’t even running 5.5, that’s…pretty bad customer service.

Currently only about 20% of sites that use PHP are on version 7 (which has been out since 2015, guys!). Version 5.6, the last sub-version of 5, is no longer being supported after December 2018, so get hot guys! Start updating your version of PHP!

If you do go ahead and upgrade your version of PHP and your site crashes (most likely from an incompatibility with the plugins or themes), you can either a) change your theme or plugin or b) theoretically, revert to the earlier version of PHP. I am not 100% convinced this will work but I would like to try to see if I can. Maybe on a local XAMPP stack, update a site and then try to revert it…or maybe pay for a month of hosting just to see if I can toggle back and forth between different versions of PHP. Look for that scintillating adventure soon!

Move Over, Caching

PHP – More Stuff to Think About