Replace zero datetime with nullable datetime. For historical reasons our software was following the Joomla convention of using the fake date “0000-00-00 00:00:00” as a placeholder meaning “no date”. MySQL 5.7 and later will, by default, not allow zeroes in the month or day part of the day unless explicitly told otherwise. While Joomla does explicitly tell MySQL to allow zeroes in dates, even in Joomla 4, this behavior is deprecated and might be removed in a future version of Joomla. We have now replaced these placeholder dates with a NULL value – a special value which MySQL and PHP understand to mean “a date has not been set yet”. All your database tables will be automatically converted upon upgrading our software or, if that fails, when you visit the Control Panel (main component) page. This means that the upgrade or first access to the Control Panel page may appear to take a bit longer than usual. That's normal and there's no reason to be alarmed. If you get a white page wait a minute and retry. On extremely big sites on very slow servers you may have to repeat that a few times. On the vast majority of sites you won't need to do that at all.
Bug fixes and minor improvements. Please take a look at the CHANGELOG below.
We officially support only the latest released version of WordPress 4.9 and 5.x.
While our software should run on any WordPress version newer than 3.8 (with several features only working fully or at all on WordPress 4.4 and later) we VERY STRONGLY recommend using the latest version of WordPress only. Newer versions of WordPress address security issues which can not be guarded against through a web application firewall / security plugin. Moreover, newer WordPress versions address bugs and features which by themselves are not security issues but can be used to facilitate the compromise of a site. For example, support for the UTF8MB4 character code may have been billed as “Emoji support” but, in fact, addresses a whole class of very sinister database attacks, hinging on the way MySQL quashes extended characters in plain UTF8 mode, which are impossible to address in a generic firewall.
In short: trying to have a secure site with old code that contains known vulnerabilities is an exercise in futility. Do the smart thing, update WordPress first, then use a security plugin to tighten your security.
We only officially support using our software with PHP 5.6, 7.2, 7.3 or 7.4. We strongly advise you to run the latest available version of PHP on a branch currently maintained by the PHP project for security reasons. Older versions of PHP have known major security issues which are being actively exploited to hack sites and they have stopped receiving security updates, leaving you exposed to these issues.
Our software should still run on PHP 7.0 and 7.1. However, we do not test with these versions and we no longer treat breaking support for these obsolete PHP versions of PHP as a bug.
At the time of this writing we have extensively tested our software with PHP 8. However, PHP 8 is sill in a pre-release state and not officially supported by WordPress. As a result we consider PHP 8 support tentative. We expect to be able to officially support PHP 8 around 2-4 weeks after WordPress implements full PHP 8 compatibility. PHP 8 itself is scheduled for release on November 26th. Our prediction for full PHP 8 support is before the end of January 2021, as long as WordPress adds support for it by end December 2020.
Our software will not run on versions of PHP older than 5.6 such as 5.5, 5.4, 5.3 or even older.