Thanks you for the feedback, Jason.
We actually took multiple steps to not only advise users about the minimum requirement changes, but stop them updating all together if they weren’t met.
If you were running Gravity PDF 3.7.8 and had an outdated version of PHP that wasn’t supported you wouldn’t even see the v4 update prompt. Of course, if you weren’t running this version that wouldn’t have worked (and any additional “red flag” notices we could have added in this release wouldn’t have been seen either).
We added a warning about backward compatibility breakages to the standard update text you see when doing updates through the dashboard. Along with that, our plugin updates follow SemVer and the breaking changes had a version update from 3.x to 4.x.
Along with those in-plugin details, we have extensive warnings and information about breaking changes posted on our website, social media and in our e-newsletter.
Finally, the update to v4 didn’t actually “break” your website with the white screen of death (I certainly hope it didn’t anyway – and if so, I’d love to investigate). You still had full control over all aspects of your website. It just stopped the PDF functionality. We included a simple rollback guide for anyone who had issues with the v4 so they could get back if they didn’t take a backup.
If you have any further suggestions for how we could have done the major version update better please let me know. Feedback is always welcome.
I appreciate the response. I think the reason I still saw the notice was because my localhost is running PHP 5.6.2 and the server that i’m deploying to had PHP 5.3. I guess the lesson learned here is I should always have matched my PHP version on the live server to what i’m running locally…I’ll smack my own head for that mistake.
Thanks again for your help and a super powerful plugin. Have a nice day 🙂
Kind regards,
Jason
