Upgrade to PHP 5.6 as minimum

[hellofromtonya]

Beans is currently compliant with PHP 5.2. As part of v2, we'll leap Beans forward to make it compliant with PHP 5.6 as a minimum, baseline PHP requirement.

[GaryJones]

What's the evidence for choosing PHP 5.6?

What's the timeline for v2? (i.e. would PHP 5.6 be officially unsupported around / soon after v2 is released)?

The jump to 7.0 provides richer syntax in terms of allowing a more strongly typed syntax.

[ibes]

Security support for 5.6 until the end of 2018
http://php.net/supported-versions.php

Rising the minimum to 7.0 would be a bolder step.

WordPress core promotes 7.2 and doesn't tell new users any more that 5.2 is still supported.
https://wordpress.org/about/requirements/
(oh, they have changed the text and give the hint, that support reach from 5.2)

The Core-PHP-Team tries to pull up the PHP version through soft but clear hints.
https://make.wordpress.org/core/tag/core-php/

It should be no problem to get PHP 7.x on servers and I support everything that puts preassure on hoster to upgrade their servers.

[hellofromtonya]

@ibes I agree. It would be a bold move to leap forward. But we are concerned about leaping too far too fast and leaving people behind. Right now Beans 1.4.0 runs on 5.2.

So we planned to leap up to 5.6 in 2.0. Then in the next big jump, we'll move up to 7.

[ibes]

What about a one time notice in Beans 1.5 for people who use PHP < 5.6 that Beans 2.0 will increase the PHP requirements and that it is highly recommended to upgrade the PHP version already?

I get the idea of backward compatibility I guess it keeps WordPress worse than it needs to be.
Eg. namespaces solve so many problems.
But yes - in contrast to WP core is 5.6 already a big step.