Unexpected upgrade to php5! Now what?

[Dolemite50]

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.

[Weedpacket]

Dolemite50 wrote:

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.

[MarkR]

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.

Mark

[MarkR]

I 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