In part one of this series we took a tour into my 14+ year old legacy CMS called LampLight. It’s an oldie but a goodie and it needs some love because it’s still in use by a couple clients and myself. We are migrating it from PHP v 5.6 to 7.3. In this part we’ll use PHP CS Fixer to identify problems and clean things up.

PHP Short Tags and Closing Tags

Talk has been cheap for some time regarding the deprecation of the short opening tag <? for PHP, and its removal has had a few false starts. Finally, a PSR for this change has passed and it will officially be deprecated in v 7.4.

We also want to eliminate the closing PHP tag in files that contain only PHP. These two issues are quite straightforward, so let’s use these as an easy dip-of-the-toe into using command line code analysis tools to have a look at our code. We can even use these tools to make the changes for us.

The process of migrating my applications from PHP 5.6 -> 7.3 has been a long one – mainly due to limited time to work on it, and additional tasks being added to the migration list. But I’ve finally made it through the low hanging fruit of easy client sites and am now migrating the first project with a significant amount of back end PHP code. In this case, it’s a legacy CMS I wrote 14+ years ago called LampLight Content Manager.