All about the system administration and application development behind a local linux-based company
My goals for upgrading to PHP 5 are to do it without breaking any customer websites, and also to use few or no legacy options. Hopefully by being strict about legacy options I can prevent pidgin-php that requires a combination of current and depreciated features, as that would make the upgrade to PHP 6 much more of a nightmare. Specifically url_fopen and register_globals will be turned off, and zend v1 compatibility mode will not be turned on. I have decided to leave register_long_arrays on, because of the sheer number of scripts that use $HTTP_*_VARS style formatting, and because there isn’t much harm in that syntax being available. Register_long_vars will be removed from php 6, but I’m willing to deal with that problem when we start looking at PHP 6 (fortunately, a file search to find all of the scripts using that syntax will be trivial).
Because of these substantial changes, I need a way for my customers to preview their websites rendered by the new php, so we can both be confident that when it comes time to flip the switch there won’t be any issues. I’ve done this by installing a new php and apache on an alternate port, and we’ll be emailing customers shortly to have them check their websites on the alternate port to verify they work correctly, and to make support available to customers who aren’t sure about how to fix their pages ( I actually anticipate very few will call).
April 1st, 2008 at 2:31 pm
nice plan! please post how it worked with your clients.