The following gets a bit ‘computer-nerdy’, so cutting to the chase, if your version the plugin is working for you, there’s no need to upgrade MSTW Bracket Builder or MSTW Bracket Builder Premium right now. The functional upgrades in these releases are minimal, and you probably don’t need them.

New versions of MSTW Bracket Builder (1.3) and MSTW Bracket Builder Premium (v1.3) will be released this week. These versions were created because PHP (a programming language that WordPress depends on) depreciated the each( ) function, which unfortunately these plugins use in critical ways. How critical? You could not create tournaments without it.

This may be too much information, so feel free to stop reading, but this will affect all WordPress sites in the not too distant future. So …

WordPress currently recommends PHP 7.4. However, security support for PHP 7.4 is ending this month (Nov 2022). So hosting providers will likely be moving to PHP 8.0 in the not too distant future. The good news is that WordPress itself is already compatible with PHP 8.0.

PHP 8.0 is a major version update with a large number of changes that break backwards compatibility, and many features that were deprecated within the PHP 7.x feature releases have been officially removed. So some plugins, my guess is more than a few, will break when websites [hosting providers] upgrade to PHP 8.0. Actually PHP 8.1 is already released. That’s how this all got started with MSTW Bracket Builder. I’m wading through the rest of the MSTW plugins right now.

If you are running plugins that are critical to your site, you might want to research those plugins’ status with regard to PHP 8.0.

BTW, thanks very much to the PHP 8.0 “early adopters” who brought this issue to my attention. You know who you are! While, I may have been cursing you when the plugin code was laying in pieces and everything was broken (JK), I appreciate you because I have been ignoring this issue for far too long.