Ask plugin/theme support

[felixarntz]

That's actually a neat idea. I hope all our amazing support volunteers don't mind though because it might mean a lot more work. But it's something we could even link to, like creating a new support ticket and asking "Does plugin ... work with PHP version ...?"

[Mte90]

Maybe it is better to write an email to all the plugin authors by the repo system itself? Like a remainder every 2 weeks until they not put the PHP version: in the readme header so the repo and next wordpress can manage the support of the plugin.

[schlessera]

I mostly thought about premium plugin/theme providers for this point. There's not always easy access to the source code for others to check, and these providers should have planned budget for proper support anyway.

[felixarntz]

Summary from https://make.wordpress.org/core/2017/10/20/php-meeting-recap-october-16th/:

This is definitely good advice when using premium plugins or themes with paid support. For community-driven plugins, it really depends on the popularity of the plugin and how many volunteers are helping out for the respective plugin. A related idea that came up was to create a list where support volunteers can add specific plugins with issues on certain PHP versions to so that over time a crowdsourced resource to find out about possible issues in advanced will evolve. Since Daniel Bachhuber and XWP have apparently been working on an automated solution for a similar cause, it may be valuable to combine these efforts. The result could for example be an API that delivers data on plugin compatibility with different PHP versions, taking both automated and manually submitted data into account. What to present about this point on the Servehappy page heavily depends on what these projects will end up working like.

[danielbachhuber]

@sirjonathan @westonruter ^