Photonic Versions 3.00-3.02 – RIP PHP 5.6, RIP IE

Posted on April 6, 2023
Categories Plugin Releases

I released a new version of Photonic on 5th April 2023. Technically I released 3 new versions, but that happened only because soon after releasing the first version I realized that the WordPress core code does not quite read PHP version information the way I was expecting it to.

These are the main features of the latest version:

  1. Changes
    1. RIP PHP 5.6: By far, the biggest change in this version was the removal of support for PHP 5.6 and below. I had highlighted this in my previous post, as well as a pinned topic on the support forum. This diverges from my prevalent philosophy of waiting for WP Core to drop support, because WP Core seems to be not holding itself to its own standards here. While I have taken ample precautions to warn people not to upgrade if they are on lower versions of PHP, this bears repeating: DO NOT UPGRADE IF YOU ARE ON PHP 5.6.
    2. RIP IE11: This is of much lower impact than the PHP support removal. IE11’s global market share has been below 1% for a while now. So, I took out all the code hooks that I had in place for it and made the code a lot leaner.
    3. Instagram Options and Authentication Removal: In the last version I made some changes in the Wizard to disallow updates for Instagram. This was in response to Meta’s policy change about only allowing business users access to its API. In this version I have removed the options and authentication section corresponding to Instagram.
    4. Miscellaneous:
      1. Support for YouTube timestamps has been added to lightboxes that allow such functionality.
      2. Moved some of the PHP code to separate files to keep things more readable.
  2. Fixes
    Fixes for the following have been put in:

    1. WP 6.2 broke the Flickr functionality to retrieve collections in parallel (see this).
    2. There was a typo in groove, which was causing a CSS error if that particular border-style was selected (see this).
    3. Option type='wp' was not working for slideshow layouts.
    4. If there were slideshows from 2 or more platforms, the first gallery of the second platform was not showing up.
    5. Widgets, Elementor and Beaver content were not showing in JS load mode.