Advice on upgrade strategy from 1.2.6 to 1.5.4

[gareth-h]

My site is a hacked about version of 1.2.6 which has been running since 2006. The hacking about has mainly been to address security issues and compatibility rather than adding functionality. Current PHP version is 5.2.17.

I have been meaning to upgrade (for about 8 years now ) but never quite got round to it. Until today!

So following advice in one of Dr Bytes how-to's I installed a copy of 1.5.4 for a trial run. The vanilla front end site looked OK but I have spent all day trying to resolve HTTP 500 errors on the admin site. I have managed to log in now but there is no page content. I am thinking this might not be worth the effort. The best advice seems to be to upgrade PHP to 5.4.

This gives me a problem as my current hosting package is also legacy and will not go beyond 5.2. I will have to switch package to get 5.4 (which involves moving to a different server as I understand) so it will be hard to test properly in advance.

Is 1.2.6 likely to have problems with PHP 5.4? Is an intermediate upgrade an option (i.e. is there a Zen Cart version compatible with both 5.2.17 and 5.4 that I could move to before upgrading PHP)? Has any one else faced a similar circumstance?

Any advice or experiences appreciated!

[DrByte]

For PHP compatibility, I go here: http://www.zen-cart.com/content.php?...o-run-zen-cart

From there you'll see that if your server only supports PHP 5.2 then to do the upgrade preparations "on the same server" you'll need to go to v1.5.1 or maybe up to v1.5.3, before getting your hosting company to move you to a server that supports a newer PHP version so you can do another upgrade step to finish bringing your Zen Cart up to date.

Or, you could talk with your hosting company about moving you to a new server by temporarily giving you space on a more modern server so you can build your upgrade "there", and then when you're ready to "go live" you can have them point your real site to the new server (after putting the old one down-for-maintenance and copying the database over to the new server and re-running the db-upgrade steps, and re-applying any customizations you've done, etc etc following the http://www.zen-cart.com/entry.php?3-...d-of-upgrading guide).

Another way some people handle it is to install a "local" (on your own computer) webserver to simulate things directly on your own PC ... and then you can (depending what webserver tool you use, hopefully) change between PHP versions as necessary to prepare your full upgrade, and then finally "go live" using similar instructions to http://www.zen-cart.com/entry.php?3-...d-of-upgrading

[carlwhat]

i'm personally a big fan of virtualBox and then running vagrant as a wrapper to virtualBox.. currently using scotchbox which seems to work great:

https://scotch.io/bar-talk/introduci...hat-just-works

its a bit of work getting your development environment up and going, but it think it's well worth it....

the new logging features on later versions of zen-cart make it worth wild to do the upgrade, and if you are very vanilla as far as changes go (which i really am not), i think its definitely worth wild to upgrade rather than customize an earlier version of ZC to work with a later version on PHP.

just my 2 cents.

[DrByte]

i'm personally a big fan of virtualBox and then running vagrant as a wrapper to virtualBox

Agreed, and indeed there's a VM ("Habitat") built specifically for Zen Cart, which is how I almost always do all my upgrades:
https://docs.zen-cart.com/Habitat/main

[gareth-h]

Great, thanks both for the good advice.

I had missed the PHP compatibility page when I was browsing so that really helps.

I had wondered about switching to a new server in advance so that is another possibility to follow up although I thought they would probably want to charge me double, but you never know!

I do have a local PC install although it is hard to make sure all the various settings are the same as on the hosting site so I never trust it totally. The VM idea is good though as I could keep multiple installs at different versions. More to look at.

Thanks for your input!