Improved error handling allows reporting PHP fatal errors (only available on sites using PHP 7). If you have a site running on PHP 7 you will now get a more informative page describing the problem that occurred, with debug information that can help us help you when you're filing a support request. This page will still appear on PHP 5 host, but for a more limited number of errors due to features not present in these old, End of Life versions of PHP.
Fixed typos that could create issues with servers using very restrictive security rules. There were a few stray characters (questionmarks and greater-than signs) in some internal links which normally don't affect operation and went unnoticed before the previous release. Some servers with more restrictive rules are likely to produce an error when those links are used. These leftover characters have now been removed.
(S)FTP connection test would report "false" instead of the reason of failure. When we refactored our JavaScript for version 7.1 we improved the (S)FTP connection test feature to report the reason why the test failed instead of just saying that it failed. Unfortunately, a small typo made that code always report "false", no matter if the test succeeded or not. The typo has been squashed.
Fixed archive download using the browser on WordPress. WordPress, unlike any other modern CMS, does not use output buffering. This means that there might be output to the browser before a plugin executes. This makes it impossible to set HTTP headers, including those required to tell the browser to download a file instead of displaying it in the browser window. Under some circumstances and depending on your WordPress configuration as well as themes and plugins used you could possibly get a failure when downloading a backup archive thorugh the browser. Instead of the archive being downloaded to your device you would see it being displayed in the download popup. We applied a very complicated workaround to enforce output buffering when downloading backup archives.
We only officially support using our software with PHP 5.6, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 or 7.4.
We strongly advise you to run either of the two latest available version branches of PHP on a branch currently maintained by the PHP project for security and performance 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. Moreover, they are slower, therefore consuming more server resources to perform the same tasks.
Kindly note that our policy is to officially support only the PHP versions which are not yet End Of Life per the official PHP project with a voluntarily extension of support for 6 to 9 months after they become End of Life. After that time we stop providing any support for these obsolete versions of PHP without any further notice. New version branches of PHP will be supported experimentally starting sometime during their Release Candidate phase and fully about 4 to 8 weeks after the first stable version of that branch is released.
We officially only support the latest WordPress 5.x release.
Our software should also work on WordPress 4.9 and ClassicPress 1.x since we do not rely on any features added in later WordPress versions.
We fully support single site and multi-site installations of WordPress. Multi-site installations can be converted on restoration from directory-based to subdomain-based or vice versa. You cannot restore a single site backup into a multi-site installation. You cannot restore / convert a blog of a multi-site network installation into a single site WordPress installation (in fact, there is no official WordPress method to do that safely).
We do not recommend using our software with WordPress versions earlier than 4.6 as some WordPress features we rely on for our software to function properly did not exist in these vintage versions. We generally strongly advise against running old, no longer maintained versions of WordPress for security and performance reasons.