For Autoptimize 2.0.1 I declared a pretty complex regex to extract font-face’s from CSS using the nowdoc-syntax which is supported from PHP 5.3 onwards. Taking into account that the first PHP 5.2 release was over 9 years ago and support ended with the release of 5.2.17, over 5 years ago I assumed using a nowdoc would not be a problem for anyone. How naive I was; several people contacted me with this ugly error-message PHP 5.2 throws;
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_SL in /wp-content/plugins/autoptimize/classes/autoptimizeStyles.php on line 396
There is a workaround and even a more fundamental fix for that already, but who would still want to run PHP 5.2, which has this huge list of security issues? Moreover PHP 5.5 and 5.6 seem approximately twice as fast as 5.2 according to these test results and PHP 7.0 is even over three times as fast as 5.2! And still almost 9% of all WordPress sites are running on that old version (so I could have known this was coming really, bugger).
I you are one of those, do urge your hosting company to urgently provide you with an upgrade path to PHP 5.6 (or even 7.0)!
He’s right. I switched to PHP 7 version, a week ago and site is now qualifies for the Formula 1 of Website Speed.
Haha..!!! I can understand your annoyance…!!! I face the same thing many a times. As far as I am concerned, both the parties are at fault, the users as well as the hosting service providers. Both the users and service providers fail to do the basic housekeeping, i.e; keeping themselves updated. A simple look at the system requirement is enough to understand what needs to be done (https://wordpress.org/about/requirements/).
I have been prevented from moving to php7 because of a problem with the types plugin. As far as I know that plugin has still not updated to support php7.
but you could upgrade to PHP 5.6.x, no? 🙂
I use php 7 and no plugin issue for me.
I have no issue. This is a great plugin and working great for me.
Hi there!
Parse error seems to be common in 5.2. I noticed similar issue on a friend website. He had hosted his WordPress blog at Bluehost.
Concerning security and features, I would highly recommend to everybody that you must switch to at least PHP 5.6 If you are hosted at 5.2 or 5.4 it’s huge risk of security and lack of features.
I’m happy with PHP 7.0 so far very amazing performance. It’s blessing of AO, that my all pages load
between 0.5 to 3 seconds only. Call me crazy, but, still I’m hungry to unlock more speed.
Looking forward for amazing performance in HHVM
Regards,
Gulshan