PHP 5 to PHP 4

[cabcree]

Okay, I learned PHP 5 which seemed logical at the time, but now I'm trying to work on my cousin's site so that it will utilize PHP. However, her host company uses PHP 4. So all the pages I did are coming up with errors. I tried changing a few of them, but they seem continuous.

Anywho...should I go backwards and just find a PHP 4 manual to do this? Or is there a better way?

Thanks for any help.

[bpat1434]

The main differences, that I've noticed, in PHP5 and PHP4 are DOM and functions. Other than that, the coding and all is pretty-much the same. So all you should have to do is figure out what functions you use that are php5 only, and which are in php4. Then convert those.

Remember that classes in php4 don't have public/private modifiers so it's all "open" to modification.

Other than going through manually and changing everything, there's no real "button" to switch your stuff from php5 to php4.

You might think about downloading the php zip from php.net and running each script against the CLI for php. That will give you exact parse error outputs for your script. Just run through each file until it's "ok". Then upload, and see what issues you have left to deal with. Try and make sure you get the same php version that her host has. There are differences in functions between 4.4.7, 4.4.6 and 4.3.x. It's a painstaking process, but it has to get done.

[cabcree]

sigh I wish they hosting company would just update to PHP5. Would make my life easier right now. Thanks for your help though!

[MarkR]

You'll probably find it more cost effective to just get a host which can use the appropriate version... they'll want to upgrade anyway, and you don't want to spend the money paying developers to downgrade then upgrade your software.

Maintaining code which works on both is pretty much impossible (at the very LEAST it doubles your testing work on each release, which is probably quite a lot of work anyway).

Mark