83. PHP 8 no longer labeled “compatible with exceptions”

With the arrival of WordPress 6.8, and applied retroactively, the “compatible with exceptions” label for PHP 8 has been removed.

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Program transcript

Hello, I’m Alicia Ireland, and you’re listening to WPpodcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.

In this episode, you’ll find the information from April 6th to 13th, 2025.

After releasing the third release candidate of WordPress 6.8, if everything goes according to schedule, the stable version of this new branch will be released on April 15. As previously announced, this will likely be the last major release of 2025.

This is prompting several teams to reconsider their release cycles for plugins or projects within the community. For example, Gutenberg is considering shifting from releases every two weeks to monthly releases, while Performance Lab will focus more on gathering data and preventing regressions, enhancing the plugin’s impact on future major versions.

The WordPress development team has decided to remove the “compatible with exceptions” label for PHP 8.0 and 8.1 versions, declaring that WordPress 6.3 and later now fully support them. Additionally, WordPress 6.6 and later versions are fully compatible with PHP 8.2.

This decision aims to provide greater clarity and confidence to users and hosting providers, encouraging upgrades to newer PHP versions.

The “compatible with exceptions” label has been retroactively removed from all previous versions. Moving forward, the documented support for any PHP version will transition directly from beta to compatible once established criteria are met.

By removing this label and officially documenting full support, the adoption of newer PHP versions is expected to increase. Currently, support for PHP 8.3 and 8.4 remains in beta for WordPress 6.7 and the upcoming 6.8 release.

And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information, and the podcast in other languages, at WPpodcast .org.

Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!