Migration Issues

PHP4 is on its last legs when it comes to support and is slated to be sundowned next month. For those of those who build sites, as I do, on content management systems that rely heavily on PHP, this is a potential issue that needs to be addressed. In my case, I have a large number of clients on a box running PHP4, so I need to make sure that all of those sites will behave properly when upgraded to the newer version of PHP. So, for testing purposes, I have set up a new hosting environment that runs strictly PHP5.

Though testing needs to be thorough, it also needs to not interrupt the daily business of my clients, so all initial testing will be done with personal sites of my own. Along with the upgrade to PHP5, these sites will also be upgraded to the latest version of the Xoops environment. Because this latest version is still in Beta, it will probably be quite some time before the auto installers like Fantastico add it to the program and so the installs will all be done manually.

The basic process is fairly simple, it just takes a while. First, the files all need to be uploaded to the location desired on the server and the initial database needs to be created. After the installation process is run, the modules needed for the site need to be installed and the data migrated. The data move is a time-consuming process as the modules’ data will need to be moved individually to ensure compatibility with the newer environment.

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