Support

We only guarantee that we will support the PHP branches currently supported by the PHP project. Support for earlier, end of life branches of PHP may be discontinued without warning.

In practical terms, we always support End of Life PHP versions for 3 months after they become End of Life, i.e. until the end of March of the following year (PHP releases new versions every December). For PHP 7.4 that's the end of March 2023. This doesn't mean that we will discontinue support for PHP 7.4 on March 31st; it only means that the next version family (major and minor version number) of our software released after it will not support it.

Please keep in mind that the schedule of PHP versions is predictable and well-known. Every PHP version gets two years of active support and one year of security fixes. When a PHP version enters the security fixes only phase of its life you need to upgrade to the next PHP version. If you keep doing that you will be upgrading PHP versions once a year, always moving to a mature 1–2 year-old PHP version that's one or two versions behind the latest, making it well-supported across all extension developers. For example, someone following this approach would be running PHP 8.0 right now and they'd be upgrading to PHP 8.1 within the next couple of months. The latest PHP version is 8.2 which is not well-supported yet, but 8.1 has rock-solid support among third party extensions and Joomla itself.