What does this mean and how do I update my PHP?
PHP version 5.6 came to an end in December of 2018. Fixes and support are no longer provided as it reached what’s called EOL or End of Life. PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor, you’d think the abbreviation would be HP but I guess Hewlett Packard nabbed that first! PHP is a scripting language used predominantly in web development created back in 1994. There you go, you’ve learnt a geeky fact!
Anywho! Like most scripting languages, different versions are always in production and older versions phased out or deprecated. This improves the security of the script and patches over any loop holes and vulnerable code. Ultimately it’s to simply improve the performance of the script.
PHP 5.6 was a very popular version and is still used heavily by a lot of websites. There are still millions of websites utilising PHP 5.6 despite its End of Life date being last year. This is not a good thing. Now that PHP 5.6 End of Life has passed there is no more support. Any corruption to software or scripts will not be covered by security fixes or updates.