The final day of 2016 has come and gone and with it came the end of active support for the PHP 5.6 series of releases. This also marks the end of active support for anything in the PHP 5.x major release and pushing on with PHP 7. In this post to thePHP.cc blog Sebastian Bergmann talks about what this means for you and the tools you use.

The active support by the PHP project for PHP 5.6, the final release series of PHP 5, ends today. What is "active support"? And what does it mean for you? To answer this, you need to understand PHP's release process.

He starts with the release schedule and when it shifted from the "consensus based model" over to an official process, introducing more formality to the whole process (in 2012). He mentions two key terms to the process: "active support" and "security support". PHP 5.6 has moved past active support and is now in the the security support phase with only security fixes to be released from here on out. Sebastian then talks about what this means for your current code and, if you're still running on PHP 5.6, what you should do to come up to speed with PHP 7.x. He lists some of the projects that are moving into the world of PHP 7 only including PhpSpec 4.0, Laravel 5.5 and Symfony 4.