Thanks to a successful crowdfunding campaign within the the ILIAS community, it has been possible to raise the funds necessary to already offer PHP7 compatibility in the next ILIAS version, 5.2. This success shows once more that open-source projects really are capable of surmounting extraordinary financial hurdles and thereby guaranteeing the sustainability of their further development. Around €150,000 were able to be collected for this project. We are very pleased with the engagement of the community: PHP7 promises significant improvements in performance combined with lower resource usage. All participants in businesses and higher education facilities were aware of the importance of this update, resulting in the rapid success of the financing goals.

PHP7 was already a central topic at the last ILIAS Development Conference in March 2016. The recently published PHP version forces all developers to overhaul their modules, as numerous methods and code that had been used up until now are no longer compatible with PHP7. To make up for this, however, the new PHP version improves the performance of applications that are programmed with it. Also, tests of other PHP-based projects show that PHP7 requires less processing power than its predecessors.

Work on the conversion has already been in full swing for weeks. All the core developers of ILIAS are reworking the source code of their components and replacing the code that no longer works under PHP7 with new methods. Many of the libraries used by ILIAS are also not compatible with PHP7 and require adjusting. All in all, it is estimated that nearly 130 man/woman-days will be required to make ILIAS run under PHP7.

The funds necessary were raised within two months. The development companies that programme for ILIAS set a good example – they gave a discount of in total around €25,000 for the work required to adjust the ILIAS code. Furthermore, around 20 higher education facilities, business and institutions took part in the crowdfunding initiative. Finally, the ILIAS open source e-Learning e.V. society contributed over €30,000. It was their advisory board who initiated the funding initiative and released the relevant resources. The implementation of PHP7 is, by the way, one of the first large projects being coordinated by the new Technical Board.

We would like to give our sincere thanks to all those who are supporting us with this mammoth project – financially, conceptually and mentally! You will be able to get a first look at the new ILIAS 5.2 with PHP7 support, of course, at the ILIAS conference on 8th and 9th September in Utrecht.