The next version of OpenCart after 4.0.2.3 will be compatible with PHP >= 7.4

On the official OpenCart github repository, you can see active work on lowering the minimum PHP version required for the CMS to 7.4. We can say that this is good news for users, because not all servers are configured with PHP 8.2, which is required by the current OpenCart 4.0.2.3. But for module developers, this is additional work - it is necessary to adapt their extensions to work on PHP 7.4. That is, after the release of the updated OpenCart (theoretically v4.0.2.4), developers will need to re-adapt previously released modules for the "four", make the code universal and for all versions of php >=7.4.

Such critical changes in the engine will affect the prices of OpenCart 4.0 extension, since changes have to be made for each CMS release, although these are not even minor versions, but patches.

We will remind that the author of OpenCart previously announced the return of the code modification system based on xml instructions - ocmod. This is a kind of downgrade of the engine to bring back users and developers who started to ignore the new 4.x release, which can now be extended only due to the system of event-hooks (events). Now, the author is downgrading the php version to the previous generation. It is difficult to imagine what else will be downgraded or returned from old versions.

UPD. Version 3.0.x.x has been updated to 3.0.3.9

But it must be said that there is also good news - the next release of OpenCart will already have its own built-in blog with categories, tags, authors and comments. The code of the blog is already present in the repository, but it is still being refined.