Unexpected upgrade to php5! Now what?

liunx

Guest
Hi,

While troubleshooting an upload error today I realized that the hosts had unexpectedly upgraded to php5. (from php4) I had no idea that an upgrade was even in the works so I dont know how it will affect my site.

I reset the perms so uploads are working again, everything seems stable, and now I'm just wondering where to go from here. Any initial concerns or "gotchas"?

How about new features? I know I'll be re-writing a lot of mysql to finally use sub-queries, and that's about the only new feature that I know of. For those of you who have upgraded from 4 to 5, what types of changes did you make to your setup to take advantage of the latest version? What are your favorite new toys?

Thanks a lot.Any initial concerns or "gotchas"? Well, there's a whole chapter in the manual about this.

I know I'll be re-writing a lot of mysql to finally use sub-queries, and that's about the only new feature that I know of.This has nothing to do with the version of PHP you're using and everything to do with the version of MySQL.

What else is new? New toys? There are a number of threads in this forum that cover exactly those questions.Your hosts have been grossly irresponsible. I recommend that you chastise them accordingly and/or switch to a more reasonable provider.

Migrating applications from PHP4 to 5 is nontrivial and clearly your production server should under no circumstances be upgraded without thorough testing on your development / test server(s).

Needless to say, upgrading from 4 to 5 should not affect any file permissions, so perhaps the cause of that problem lies elsewhere.

Shared hosting is a major cause of problems- don't use it if you can avoid it, please!

I am wondering if anyone on the forums knows any hosts which host PHP apps in a responsible fashion (e.g. not doing upgrades without ample notification)?

(NB: I don't use third party shared hosting for my apps nor should you if you can avoid it)

When upgrading our major application from PHP4 to PHP5, I found it inconvenient to make a version which works on both (due to missing features in PHP4 and increased strictness in 5), so I just bit the bullet and scrapped PHP4 support. However, this means that a very coordinated approach is required with the hosting provider.

MarkI should note that maintaining an application to run on both PHP4 and PHP5 is virtually impossible unless you use a diminutive subset of features, which is highly undesirable.

Moreover, it will effectively double your testing workload (which I find very great already)

Therefore I don't recommend that anybody does so.

Mark
 
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