Often WordPress gets shit for still supporting PHP 5.2. In fact, while they recommend 5.6 or up, WordPress still works on 5.2 and probably will for years to come, even though everyone knows PHP 5.2 is buggy, insecure, and not supported. No sensible webhost still uses it if there’s an alternative, but sadly there are reasons why some hosts are stuck on it.
Why does WordPress still work on 5.2? Because there’s little benefit to be had in upgrading, and only harm. As I’ve said before, in the name of progress we run the risk of running ourselves right off the cliff. There’s nothing in 5.4 that WordPress needs. Please remember that I am a stickler about needs vs wants, there’s a lot we want, but nothing that is critical and that cannot be accomplished in a PHP 5.2 world. One day that will change, and when it does, we’ll rethink this whole argument. But right now, there is no need.
My fear with a PHP 5.2 upgrade is that the people we would hurt with it are the ones least capable of resolving the problem. If we showed users an alert on their admin dashboard saying “You’re using PHP 5.2, please contact your hosting administrator and ask them to upgrade to a modern, secure, version of PHP” then we’re telling the wrong people something. It’s not the users who need to hear this, it’s the webhosts. And speaking as one? We know. Not only do we know, we actually care more than you do, and we’re working on it for everything not because of WordPress and it’s 25% market share, but because we know it’s the right thing to do.
But this is not a PHP version debate. This is actually a reflection on something happening today. You see, WordPress still uses the 1.x branch of jQuery. Why? Again, it works. There’s no reason to upgrade to jQuery 2.x and doing so would break things. Among other reasons, WordPress still supports IE 8 which is used by 11% of computers out there. That’s not a small number. In fact, 11% of WordPress sites still use PHP 5.2! You see the situation? 11% is not insignificant.
This comes up because Bootstrap 4 has decided to drop support for the jQuery 1.x branch. As far as I understand, they don’t want to support IE 8 and it’s 12% smaller. There isn’t a single code benefit that is included in jQuery 2.x that Bootstrap is using and, since jQuery 2.x is compatible with 1.x, you can switch back to it right now without any loss. But they don’t want to support IE 8. In fact, they don’t support it, and from that perspective it sounds wise, doesn’t it?
It’s not.
WordPress includes its own version of jQuery (still on the 1.x branch) and many other similar JS files, which have all been rigorously tested with both WordPress and many of the most common plugins. In order to provide the best compatibility and experience for users, WordPress asks that you not package your own (especially not an older version) and instead use wp_enqueue_script() to pull in WordPress’s version. There are many reasons for this but the simplest are as follows
- WordPress has jQuery. Save diskspace and leave your own out.
- If every plugin and theme removes WordPress’ jQuery and uses their own, there’s a potential for conflicts. Who’s jQuery wins?
- Using your own jQuery changes the way WordPress plugins and themes may work in unexpected ways.
Can you remove jQuery and use your own? Of course! You just can’t host your code on WordPress.org if you do that.
Now, there’s a missing metric here. What the percentage of sites using Bootstrap are on WordPress? For that I’m going to have to extrapolate. Looking at builtwith trends, it looks like 1.8% of the entire Internet uses a site with Bootstrap. Joomla 3.x uses v1.11.3, Drupal 7.x uses jQuery 1.4.4, and Drupal 8 will use 2.1.4. Remember this is a total rewrite of Drupal, though. They do not concern themselves with backwards compatibility when they jump to new versions, and that means you cannot measure the percentage of sites on the internet that will use Drupal 8. We can reasonably assume, since WordPress is fully backwards compatible, that the 80% of WordPress users who are on the 4.x branch will upgrade to 4.4 in December, and continue to do so for the future.
Even if we cannot claim that 25% of Bootstrap sites are on WordPress, we can argue that with all major CMSs currently using jQuery 1.x, Bootstrap is about to kick a significant portion of their audience to the curb. Of course, not even 2% of the Internet is using Bootstrap. Will that be a great loss for the Internet? Not really. But it will incur a massive lost to Bootstrap.
This real life example is precisely what I mean when I say that I worry about the user experience with our bold assumptions in our projects. Bootstrap’s logical assumption, that since they don’t support IE 8 there will be no loss by moving to components that don’t support IE 8 either, is a fallacy. They are thinking only on one level. They’re only seeing the ‘benefit’ (and I use this term loosely) of formally ending support for a user-base they never supported in the first place. This won’t impact their users, so it doesn’t matter.
What they’ve neglected to consider is that their userbase actually encompasses other people who support IE 8. So while we know that no one using Bootstrap and WordPress supports IE 8, simply by dint of using Bootstrap, this new jQuery version actually forces them to exclude them, instead of passively. And by doing this, they will shortly find plugins and themes that use Bootstrap 4 rejected from the repository, which will only harm adoption of Bootstrap as a framework.
This isn’t a threat. This is reality. This is the difference between “We don’t support IE 8” and “We would rather not support IE 8 than be compatible with 25% of the Internet.”
Looking at it that way, it’s a simple call.
Put jQuery 1.x back in. Make 2.x a recommended option. And move on.
