By Robardi56 on

Hi,
my server is running drupal 4.7.4 on php 4.4.2 and mysql 4.1.21 .

Is it recommended to upgrade php and mysql to 5.x for drupal 5.x ? What are the advantages ?

Cordially,
Brakkar

Comments

styro’s picture

styro commented

On the upside PHP 5 is supposed to be a little faster, and there might be one or two modules that need it.

But from a stability point of view PHP is notorious for changing things around from version to version (even in minor updates) and breaking stuff.

PHP 4 is far more stable in that respect, and everything in Drupal is pretty much coded for PHP 4. So you won't lose much by staying with PHP 4.

If you do go PHP 5, from hearing other people I'd recommend 5.1.x. 5.0 seemed a little crap, and 5.2 is still undergoing lots of breakage - eg without patching Drupal 4.7.4 won't work on PHP 5.2 until Drupal 4.7.5 is released soonish.

Personally I'm still on PHP 4.3 and MySQL 4.1. But I'll upgrade after Debian Etch is released.

--
Anton
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asbdpl’s picture

asbdpl commented

> Personally I'm still on PHP 4.3 and MySQL 4.1. But I'll upgrade after Debian Etch is released.

I wouldn't recommend that. I needed PHP5 and MySQL5 for another application (MediaWiki) and just upgraded my Sarge-box to Etch. The result was, that - in Drupal 5 - many 3rd party modules became disfunctional, and, even worse, all special characters and German Umlaute broke.

That applies to (a) one fresh installation of Drupal 5 on one site, and (b) on one many-times upgraded Drupal 5 (coming from 4.x).

Judging from what I'm experiencing here, Drupal is far beyond Unicode-clean. It never supported non-English characters in URLs (as MediaWiki does smoothly), and the breakage of the node's contents is close to worst case for an non-English website. In MediaWiki, all kinds of weird URLs are working perfectly, it supports inputting the most bizarre languages, and it survived the Etch-upgrade without a glitch.

However, I don't have any idea, if there are similar problems to be expected in purely English Drupal installations.

Greetings, asb

test127’s picture

test127 commented

Thanks for posting that. I was planning to upgrade to Etch as soon as it was officially released (which it looks like it was a couple days ago), but maybe now I'll wait. Also, I'm not sure about MySQL 5, but you can at least get PHP5 from backports.org.

asbdpl’s picture

asbdpl commented

I moved the discussion to http://drupal.org/node/135486; maybe someone with better knowledge of MySQL and Drupal can comment there on this problem(s).

Greetings, -asb