We have received a couple of reports about Store Locator Plus® for WordPress not working with PHP 8.1. The WordPress PHP 8.1 compatibility is officially listed as “not compatible” in January 2022 and remains that way today (August 20th, 2022). There is no official release date for WordPress on PHP 8.0 or PHP 8.1 at this time.
Officially WordPress supports PHP 7.4. As such, Store Locator Plus® for WordPress is only officially supported on PHP 7.4.
Users of the Store Locator Plus® SaaS service don’t have to worry about this. We’ve taken care of ensuring the location service is running on a stable platform
WordPress PHP 8.0 Status
However, we have tested WordPress on PHP 8.0 along with the latest release of theStore Locator Plus® for WordPress plugin. It does appear to be working normally without notable warnings or errors. While not officially supported, we do believe you can run WordPress and Store Locator Plus® for WordPress on PHP 8.0 without any issues. With that in mind, we are providing support and patching services for the Store Locator Plus® for WordPress with PHP 8.0 installations.
WordPress PHP 8.1 Compatibility
As for PHP 8.1 with WordPress and Store Locator Plus® for WordPress, that is officially NOT SUPPORTED at this time. We are working on updating and patching Store Locator Plus® to work with PHP 8.1. We will continue to do so as long as patches needed for PHP 8.1 do not break compatibility with PHP 7.4 or PHP 8.0.
Currently WordPress does not play well with PHP 8.1. In our testing using the official WordPress Docker Container for WordPress 6.01 on PHP 8.1, several problems occur in a pure “WordPress-as-shipped” environment. There are multiple warnings that are non-fatal but cause inconsistencies in how WordPress behaves.
For example, one warning impacts the initial setting of cookies used to track a user session when logged into the admin interface. This glitch has caused many instances where we’ve had to login several times before the login “takes”. If you do not have warning displays enabled on your web server, most production servers DO NOT have this enabled, then you will not see the warning and will be led to believe you simply mis-typed your password.
If you work through the aggravating “login three times issue caused by the PHP 8.1 incompatibility you can eventually activate the Store Locator Plus® plugin. This currently throws and error which we are working to resolve in the Store Locator Plus® 2208.15.XX release planned for later this month.