Major Webhosts upgrade to PHP5 and MySQL5
Monday, February 23, 2009 (07:55:24)

Posted by Devon

Most web hosts have been slowly converting to PHP5 and MySQL5 over the course of the past 2 years. It seems as though most of the world is now running PHP5 and MySQL as the major hosts such as Site5 have completed the upgrades.

For those still running DragonflyCMS 9.1.2 with a newly upgraded PHP and MySQL you'll find many modules and functions will break especially the forums. 9.1.2 sites will still function but with a lot of errors which seem to come from nowhere. The culprit is when a webhost upgrades PHP, MySQL, and Apache.

For example, PHP functionality for dynamic signatures will break in PHP5 because ImgPNG compression is now 1-9 instead of 1-100. It's highly unlikely that anyone was using compession 9/100 with PHP4 because the image would be extremely degraded in quality. That's just one of many examples of code changes needed in PHP5. The above example does not affect DragonflyCMS directly but it's just an example of what can affect coding.

I have upgraded some client sites to 9.2.1 after a lot of pleas. The difference over the span of 2 years since participating with DF is laughable and negligible at best. Sure there was a lot of work done towards making the CMS PHP5 and MySQL 5 compatible but other than that not much has changed in the modules themselves. The blocks administration though much more customizable to show any block you want on any page and in any location on any individual page is far too complex for the average admin, one again proving that the DF developers priorities are to stick with the easy stuff. 4 years and still no coppermine template? Coppermine gave up priority of the developers about 2 seconds after they made the first release.

DF now uses the MathML2 doctype which is so strict that even xhtml code doesn't display correctly. Yes, I'm talking about table vs div design. Most of the designers out there that despise tables are the ones that fully admit it's because they never grasped table design. I love tables and divs equally. They both have their place in web design. To try and phase out tables completely is a mistake in my opinion.

I've been replacing the doctype of the upgraded 9.2.1 sites with xhtml 1.0 to make my life easier. If you are going to go strict then go strict. MathML is far beyond strict, it's a nightmare for a designer and it's a special doctype meant for mathematical computations. It shouldn't be the doctype of any CMS.