Upgrade path for this project (Yii 2.0 to 2.2 then to 3.0)

[XzAeRo]

The Yii Framework Development team recently announced the upcoming release of Yii 2.2 which will bring many of the expected upgrades of Yii 3 to the Yii 2.X version. See: https://forum.yiiframework.com/t/embracing-the-future-yii-framework-updates-and-yii-2-2-discussions/135451

The idea is to bridge the gap of a migration from Yii2 to Yii3 in a more simple way, without introducing that many breaking changes and without the need to rewrite everything, or at least, to do it in a less development intensive way.

This, in my personal opinion, is excellent news considering the stale state of Yii in general. Yii2 support of the most popular extensions has been abandoned for many years at the moment, and there are not many active developers in the extensions community, which has been crippling the Yii2 environment for a while, including this very project.

Now, upgrading to Yii 2.2 will bring many changes to this very project too. We will have to bump PHP to 8.1 as a minimum, which WILL brake many of the underlying extensions, and will require either creating forks and maintain them ourselves, and will most likely require a change in the project structure (hopefully not).

An upgrade to Yii3 WILL require a full project rewrite, since the project structure of Yii3 software doesn't allow "multiple applications" structure that we have in this project. We will need to separate backend, frontend, api and console apps into separate sub-projects. I've been toying around this, and the results are good, but since many Yii3 extensions are still under development, most of my developments are broken withing a few weeks, so they are not stable enough yet.

But these news from the Yii Framework Development Team seem interesting enough to make me write this post, and to reevaluate the upgrade paths for this project.

Should we embark in this upgrade path? Or should we just move on to Yii3 and start from zero?