International ILIAS Blog

One of the greatest challenges in the development of ILIAS 5.2 is – as reported – the conversion to PHP7. This requires us to go through and update the whole source code. Additionally, a whole number of external libraries need to be replaced. We talked to Fabian Schmid, who as a member of the Technical Board is coordinating the work, about the current state of the conversion.

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.