A little sys admin/app admin foo this evening for some websites I run. We have a family recipe repository in a MediaWiki instance, and I have a couple of Drupal sites for some Boy Scout groups…my ISP (1and1) is deprecating PHP 4 and PHP 5.2, and I thought I’d migrate to PHP 5.4, the only version that’ll be supported in April. I planned to get a jump on it by setting my account’s global PHP to 5.4. Well, it broke the old version of MediaWiki I was using. A good time for an upgrade! MediaWiki is pretty easy to upgrade, but first I had to move the data from a version 4 MySQL database to a version 5 MySQL, then run the upgrade script. Worked fine, except that it was throwing an error for the default timezone config. Apparently PHP 5.4 is stricter about this. Finally figured where to set that, and it worked. Then, I noticed that the calendar module on my Scout site was throwing pages of warnings. Surfed drupal.org and this appears to be a problem that appears in some cases with PHP 5.4. I’ve taken that option off the menu right now and posted a message on my site about it, while I poke around for a solution. I’ve got a couple modules to upgrade as well as a point release of Drupal, so I might do that and try the calendar again before I dig too deeply.
The moral of this story is that you shouldn’t start hacking your websites unless you want to spend the evening fixing them 😉