> Many of these are ticking bombs - unmaintained extensions with possible 
> security issues.

Totally agree.

> Right now the biggest problem of WordPress ecosystem is quality of community 
> extensions and themes.

Being intimately involved in the WordPress ecosystem, I do not know If it is 
the *biggest* problem.  

But I digress...

> Cutting of all old and unmaintained extensions may be not that bad...

It depends on who you ask if it is bad or not.  I think that many on this list 
would think it is a good thing.  OTOH, I think many people who have working 
websites that currently use one of these plugins and who do not have developers 
on staff would think it is a very bad thing. Especially if such a change could 
cost them a significant unplanned amount of money and hassle to resolve.

Which brings up an important point. There is a big difference between the 
plugins in the WordPress.org <http://wordpress.org/> repo that might have 
security issues  I think the WordPress Core team would be open to sunsetting 
any plugins that are objectively found to have security issues, or even major 
PHP compatibilities.

OTOH, given that WordPress is over 1/3rd of the web that means many of these 
plugins are active on working sites, sites where their web host might encourage 
them to upgrade to PHP8 when PHP 7 is no longer supported.  

It is those people who are likely to be most negatively affected, and the vast 
majority of them will never have hired a developer in their life let alone 
understand why a handful of people decided to "break their site" without them 
having any say in the matter.

#fwiw

-Mike
P.S. Again, I want to clarify I am not saying what the PHP core team should do. 
I am simply relaying what I think the ramifications are likely to be — based 
upon my experience with WordPress since 2010 and PHP since 2008 — if breaking 
changes are introduced into PHP 8.  It is up to the voting members to actually 
decide what will happen.




> On Sep 13, 2019, at 1:11 AM, Robert Korulczyk <rob...@korulczyk.pl> wrote:
> 
>> Upgrading the ~68,000 open source plugins available on wordpress.org 
>> <http://wordpress.org/>, thousands of commercial plugins, and and an untold 
>> number of custom-developed bespoke plugins and custom themes is where the 
>> concern lies. 
> 
> Many of these are ticking bombs - unmaintained extensions with possible 
> security issues. Right now the biggest problem of WordPress ecosystem is
> quality of community extensions and themes. Cutting of all old and 
> unmaintained extensions may be not that bad...
> 
> 
> Regards,
> Robert Korulczyk

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