Two real WordPress plugins on PHP 8.4: what broke, and what I refused to auto-fix
PHP 8.2 stops getting security fixes on December 31, 2026. PHP 8.3 already left active support at the end of 2025. If you maintain a WordPress plugin, a theme, or an older PHP app, the hosting company is going to move you to 8.3 or 8.4 sooner or later, whether the code is ready or not. The hard part of that move is rarely "does it compile". It is three questions at once: What actually breaks on…
PHP 8.2 security updates ended on December 31, 2026, and PHP 8.3 support ended at the end of 2025. Hosting companies will soon force upgrades to either 8.3 or 8.4, regardless of whether the code is ready. The challenge lies in determining what will break during the upgrade, what can be fixed automatically without altering behavior, and how to fix it without dropping the PHP versions used by existing users. This is where Refit, an open-source CLI tool, comes in with two commands: refit scan and refit fix.
Rector and PHPCompatibility are used by Refit, but Refit adds its own twist. It reads the oldest PHP version that the code must support from the plugin or theme header, readme.txt, or composer.json. It then uses a pre-selected list of 54 compatibility rules, 52 from Rector and 2 of its own, to check for conflicts between the target version and the minimum supported version. Refit only makes fixes that will still run on the minimum supported version and reports issues that need manual intervention.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
