Next week on Thursday, December 8th, all VIP Go pre-production environments (not including production environments) will be switched over to PHP 7. After the switch, please thoroughly test all pre-production environments for any issues.
After upgrading pre-production environments, production environments will be switched to PHP 7 on Thursday, January 5th (4 weeks later).
PHP 7 brings important performance improvements and has been extensively tested with WordPress at scale on WordPress.com, including all WordPress.com hosted VIP sites.
Ahead of the upgrade, please ensure all local environments are running PHP 7 with WP_DEBUG enabled and pay close attention to any PHP warnings or other issues. For example, VVV has been using PHP 7 for several months, but if you have an out-of-date instance, simply pull the latest code from GitHub and run vagrant up --provision to be upgraded.
For more information on migrating from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7, please see the official Migration Guide.
If you’d like to switch over to PHP 7 ahead of this timeline, please let us know – we’re happy to upgrade you at a time of your choosing.
As always, if you have any questions, please let us know!
tl;dr – pre-production VIP Go sites will be upgraded to PHP 7 on December 8th, and production sites will be upgraded 4 weeks later on January 5th.
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