78% of the web powered by PHP (3% on PHP 8)

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Honestly I did not notice that many important breaking changes and the PHP community has tools to detect them. Some of them can even be automatically be fixed.
The real problem is that some important softwares/frameworks did not support PHP 8 until recently:

  • Wordpress supported PHP 8.0 since version 5.6 (released on 08.12.2020), but only in a “beta” kind of way. Like it’s cool when your blog works, but we can’t guarantee it. Even the most recent Wordpress version, 5.9, still only supports 8.0 in a beta. PHP 8.1 isn’t even mentioned. See also https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/references/php-compatibility-and-wordpress-versions/
  • Typo3 supported PHP 8.x beginning with Typo3 v11, released on 05.10.2021. See also https://typo3.org/cms/roadmap/
  • MediaWiki is still not compatible with PHP 8.x. See also https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Compatibility/en

The only big exceptions I found are the following:

  • Symfony supported new PHP versions very early and even made existing releases compatible, e.g. in the issue PHP 8.1 Support which was closed on 14.09.2021, more than a month before PHP 8.1 had it’s first stable release. See also https://symfony.com/releases/4.4 and https://github.com/symfony/symfony/issues/41552#issuecomment-919304798
  • Laravel seems to have supported PHP 8.x early too. Though I don’t know more details. See also https://blog.laravel.com/laravel-php-8-support
  • Drupal supports PHP 8.0 since version 9.1.0, released on 02.12.2020. See also https://www.drupal.org/docs/system-requirements/php-requirements
  • Joomla supports PHP 8.0 since version 3.9.23, released on 24.11.2020. See also https://downloads.joomla.org/technical-requirements
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