The Next OpenCart Version After 4.0.2.3 Will Be Compatible With PHP >= 7.4

On the official OpenCart GitHub repository you can notice active work on lowering the minimum PHP version required for the CMS down to 7.4. You could say this is good news for users, since not all servers have PHP 8.2 in their configuration, which is what the current OpenCart 4.0.2.3 requires. But for module developers it's additional work - they need to adapt their extensions to also work on PHP 7.4. That is, after the release of the updated OpenCart (theoretically v4.0.2.4), developers will once again need to adapt the previously released modules for the "fourth branch", making the code universal across all versions of PHP >= 7.4.

Such constant critical engine changes will affect prices for OpenCart 4.0 modules, since you have to make changes for essentially every CMS release, even though these are not even minor versions but patches.

As a reminder, the OpenCart author previously announced the return of the XML-based code modification system - OCMOD. This is, in a way, an engine downgrade to bring back users and developers who started ignoring the new 4.x release, which currently can only be extended using the events-hooks system. Now the author is downgrading the PHP version to the previous generation. It's hard to imagine what else will be downgraded or brought back from the old versions.

UPD. A 3.0.x.x version update has been released - OpenCart 3.0.3.9

But it's worth saying that there is also good news - in the next OpenCart release there will already be a built-in native blog with categories, tags, authors and comments. The blog code is already present in the repository, but it is still being refined.