By Manuel Lemos

Support for enumerations is a new feature requested by many developers that recognize the benefits of this new feature.

PHP 8.1 introduced the support for enumerations as a data type built-in in the PHP language.

If you use constants to emulate the benefits of enumerations in versions older than PHP 8.1, you will appreciate this new feature.

Still, you need to be careful when upgrading your PHP code to a newer version if you have not yet used PHP 8.1 or later.

Read this article to learn more about enumerations in PHP and how to upgrade smoothly to a new PHP version to benefit from this feature minimizing the risks of doing an upgrade and avoiding breaking the code of your PHP applications that used to run on PHP versions older than 8.1.