iG:Syntax Hiliter v5.1

It’s been almost 7 years since the release of v5.0; seems like it’s becoming a pattern. 😉

The funny (& sad) thing is that this release would’ve come out in 2020 and is two years late. GeSHi library had been throwing PHP notices, etc. ever since the update to PHP 7 due to old code which had been deprecated & I’d been meaning to push out a patch to tide things over till the next big update along with a few other changes in the plugin code. I finally got around to it in early 2020, had the code update all ready and tested and ready to go Live. But things changed suddenly on a global scale, my personal life changed dramatically soon after. Between that and other things, this, unfortunately, just fell through the cracks. 🙁

But, iG:Syntax Hiliter v5.1, is now available for download.

What has changed?

A bunch has changed on the code front, but there are no new features. This is just a maintenance release of sorts.

• Minimum PHP version requirement bumped to 7.4.0. The plugin simply won’t load on lower versions.
• A re-factor of code to prevent any PHP warnings and notices to show up due to a number of things that became deprecated since v7.0 was released & then subsequently in other 7.x releases.

This is a maintenance release of sorts where code has been updated to work with PHP v7.4.x.

This is also the last release where GeSHi library has been used for syntax highlighting. GeSHi library has not been updated in several years and it looks unlikely that it will continue anymore.

This plugin started back in 2004 with the GeSHi library and a number of features in that library came to be from the feedback generated from using this plugin as Nigel McNie (author of GeSHi) & I would discuss features over email going back-n-forth. Thanks Nigel for all the hard work you put in over the years having created & maintained this fantastic library.

The next release of iG:Syntax Hiliter will use a different syntax highlighting library. All existing shortcodes will continue to work and so the update and transition would be seamless for the most part; a feature or two that will phase out and a few changes in plugin configuration options should be expected.

A more detailed changelog is available here.

And here are the download links:

• WordPress Plugins Repo: https://wordpress.org/plugins/igsyntax-hiliter/
• Github: https://github.com/coolamit/ig-syntax-hiliter/

As always, pull requests are welcome at Github.