Drupal 7.71 has been released today

Drupal 7.71 has been released today on 3 June 2020. This maintenance release of the Drupal 7 series includes bug fixes and small API/feature improvements. It does not have any major, non-backwards-compatible new functionalities. No security fixes are included in this release either.

This is the first release to fully support PHP 7.4. Please note AltaGrade has been deploying systems with PHP 7.4 since November 28, 2019 when it was first released. If you are on AltaGrade server that does not have PHP 7.4, then please just create a respective request on your AltaGrade Dashboard and we will gladly install it for you.

PHP 7.4 brings lots of new features, syntax additions and fixes such as:

1. Arrow functions for cleaner one-liner functions
2. Preloading to improve performance
3. Typed properties in classes
4. Improved type variance
5. The null coalescing assignment operator as a shorthand
6. FFI for better extension development in PHP
7. Underscores can be used to format numeric values
8. Spread operator in arrays
9. And more...

You can track the progress of making Drupal 8 & 9 compatible with PHP 7.4 on https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3086374. Release notes for Drupal 7.71 can be found on https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/releases/7.71