#PHP 8.1+ Upgrade Complete

Simple Invoices now fully supports PHP 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, and 8.4. Here's what changed under the hood.

#Key Upgrades

#Zend Framework → ZF1-Future

The original Zend Framework 1 reached end-of-life years ago and didn't support PHP 8+. We've migrated to the ZF1-Future community fork (v1.24.4) which provides full PHP 8.x compatibility while maintaining the same API.

#Email: Zend_Mail → PHPMailer 6.10

The old Zend_Mail library was deprecated and insecure. We've upgraded to PHPMailer 6.10: a modern, actively maintained email library with:

• Full SMTP authentication
• TLS 1.2/1.3 encryption
• HTML email with plain-text fallback
• Proper namespace support (PHPMailer 6 uses namespaces)

#Database Abstraction

All database queries now use PDO with prepared statements, providing better security and compatibility across MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and SQLite.

#Modern PHP Features

The codebase now takes advantage of modern PHP features:

• Type declarations and return types
• Null coalescing operator (??)
• Namespaced classes for new components
• Composer autoloading for modern libraries

#Testing

Tested and verified on:

• PHP 8.1.0+
• PHP 8.2.0+
• PHP 8.3.0+
• PHP 8.4.5

#What This Means for You

• Your hosting provider's latest PHP version is supported
• Better performance (PHP 8.x is significantly faster than 7.x)
• Ongoing security updates from the PHP team
• Access to modern PHP libraries and tools