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Could I get away with php 5.3.3 ?

Posted: Tue Jan 24, 2017 1:37 pm
by pragmatist
Newbie here so if this has been answered elsewhere then please do point me to another thread.

See from the Requirements that Serendipity needs a min php version of 5.4. Unfortunately I have 5.3.3 on the live server on which I would like to use Serendipity. Don't really want to rock the boat with a version change, even assuming it's possible as it is Centos 6.

Could I get away with php 5.3.3 either with Serendipity 2.0.5 or by installing a slightly earlier version of Serendipity ?

(Planning to use it with Postgres 8.4.2 so if there would be any problems with that I would also love to know.)

TIA
P

Re: Could I get away with php 5.3.3 ?

Posted: Tue Jan 24, 2017 4:45 pm
by onli
I'm not sure. I personally gave zero attention to not breaking compatibility with versions that old. I know that Garvin added some compatibility patches, and the Changelog only stated when 5.3 became a hard requirement with 2.0. When moving the documentation to Github we upped the requirement to 5.4, and I think that was because of a specific thing, but I do not find it anymore. It is possible that PHP 5.3.3 could just work.

I don't see a specific problem with Postgres, but sadly the Postgres backend is a lot less tested than the MySQL and Sqlite backend.

Installing serendipity is very easy. Best thing will be to just test it out.

Re: Could I get away with php 5.3.3 ?

Posted: Tue Jan 24, 2017 5:50 pm
by pragmatist
Thanks Onli. I've used Serendipity before and liked it - hence the wish to use it again for this web site which is work not leisure - though (proudly) Open Source software too - IoT for boat owners http://www.skippersmate.co.uk.

We use Postgres for everything and have done for years so I am relatively comfortable with that. I will test it out on the live server (no use trying to reproduce it on my machine as it is Jessie and the php version is 5.6.27).

I will post here when I've tried it so that someone else may benefit from my success or failure.

Great bit of software.

Penny

Re: Could I get away with php 5.3.3 ?

Posted: Wed Jan 25, 2017 11:30 am
by garvinhicking
Hey,

I actually do think you will face issues with PHP 5.4. There are some library things and function declarations that might raise errors. It depends a bit though on the functionality you plan to use.

I would really suggest to try to update PHP, since even PHP 5.6 is outdated now :-D

Re: Could I get away with php 5.3.3 ?

Posted: Wed Jan 25, 2017 1:14 pm
by pragmatist
Hi Garvin

Many thanks for the reply. Fully agree with you re up to date but if you're working with an LTS server then you can be stuck with what you've got.

Serendipity seems to be working fine so far - I only want to use basic functionality to produce articles better suited to this format than the phpBB3 forum so with luck I'll get away with it. I won't whinge tho if it doesn't as I recognise it's my decision :) Will check the logs when I get a moment to see if anything's being reported.

Love your Flickr stuff - sure you can't be taking all that in Cologne ?!!

Penny

Re: Could I get away with php 5.3.3 ?

Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2017 11:58 am
by lazza
Hey guys, going a bit off topic here, but I also checked out Garvin's Fickr - great stuff! Makes me want to travel :wink:

Re: Could I get away with php 5.3.3 ?

Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2017 1:46 pm
by onli
That reminds me: There is an incompatiblity with PHP 5.3 in the rss.php, as that uses the shorthand syntax to create an array ([elem1, elem2, ...]) in line 25. See viewtopic.php?p=10446693#p10446693. You'd have to patch that to use array() instead.