I’ve seen quite a few users reporting PHP errors when trying to run b2evolution on PHP 8.
b2evolution, in its current state, is certainly not compatible with PHP 8 unless someone goes through the code to make it PHP 8 compliant.
However, if it can help someone, I wanted to report that the latest b2evolution (7.2.x / 7.3.x-PRO) runs perfectly fine on PHP 7.4.
As a matter of fact, I was able to install it today on a fresh Debian 11 installation.
Noteworthy:
- PHP 7.4 is past its end of life support date since November 2022.
- Debian 11 is the “old stable” branch of Debian.
- Debian 11 (“old stable”) uses PHP 7.4 by default.
- Debian 12 (current “stable”) uses PHP 8 by default.
- It might be possible to downgrade PHP 8 to PHP 7.4 on Debian 12 but I have not tried it. It is certainly not something recommended, but if you insist on running EOL software, you gotta do what you gotta do…
I have personally no plan to swicth to PHP 8. I’d rather invest the migration time and effort into switching all my sites to static pages. Most of my sites have been migrated already. Here is my workflow if you want to do the same.