CI v1.5.4 and PHP 5.3

[eluser]JasonS[/eluser]
People need to drop the attitude here..

Pete you came in here asking how to make an ancient version of CI work with PHP5.3. Its a stupid question but I don't think you realized this was the case and you shouldn't have been ribbed for it.

To get your clients site to work with PHP5 you can upgrade to 1.7.2 which shouldn't involve much work at all. Just need to replace the system folder and test... Upgrading to CI2.0 will involve a little bit of work. Reverting to PHP4 is fine if the client isn't paying you. It is the worst solution however if they are..

As for your client, they need to understand that technology moves forward and eventually they will need to update their website. They do not need a rewrite, they do not need to spend lots of money. They just need to hire a developer for a day or two once a year to ensure the technologies powering their website are stable and up to date.

Jeimer didn't say 'dead language'.. you should read his post again.

[eluser]Jelmer[/eluser]
I think JasonS bottom-lined it pretty well, but I couldn't let the following slide.

By dead language I guess you mean HTML and Javascript, of which I have stuff running from more than 10 years, despite the upgrades.

A couple of points there:
- You never had trouble with IE5.5, 6, 7, 8 and possibly 9 breaking all W3C standards and even its own backwards compatibility between versions? That almost makes you superman.
- HTML4, XHTML1.1 haven't really been upraded for over 10 years, HTML5 is now really being adopted but still not released. Dead language? Well first of all these 2 are markup languages, kinda incredibly unfair to compare with a programming language. 10 years without a new release? Maybe not dead, but on serious life-support development wise. Also you can tell the browser which doctype to expect, something CI can hardly do with the PHP version.
- JavaScript, not really my area of expertise but if I'm not mistaken JS has had some serious backwards compatibility issues between versions.

But the most important point of all: CI didn't break itself, PHP decided to break some backwards compatibility. And not even really break it, only with deprecation warnings that can be switched off easily. My point here is: CI can't be forwards-compatible, that's impossible. PHP is backwards compatible and warns when some features will be removed in the next version, both of which are good things but you can't blame CI for PHP breaking it.