Hello Postnuke Community.

First of all, thanks to all which are working on postnuke, cause this CMS is just the best solution for smaler companies to have theire on CMS.

I'm using Postnuke since the early 0.6x version and I got an error this week which disconcerted me if Postnuke is the CMS System to use for the future.

Let me short explain why:

I had a page running under postnuke 0.64, i have not upgradet it on the future releases cause i had made some changes in different modules and the page was like it should be. And also because the update script is not really working and causes a lot of problems and manual work.

After my provider has updated his webservers on the latest releases from Apache and PHP the site was down and it was not possible to bring it up again. According to PHP specialists there was a problem in a certain amount of code from postnuke, which is not able to deal with the new PHP version.

So, the only solution was to build the page new and this under a big pressure and with a lot of work.

I' know how to install and use the Postnuke, cause I use this CMS on several sites. But i'm not the PHP coder. And because of that i would like to hear your statement about the future releases from postnuke or on the future of already installed older postnuke releases if a new PHP version will be installed on the webserver you are running your site...

You see the concernings i have? I'm interested if there is now a bigger "safety" in the postnuke release 0.723 for future influences from the "background" like PHP and apache...

Or do i have to follow each step from the postnuke devlopments and update the site every time a new release comes out?

I hope you don't understand me wrong, I just love to work with postnuke, but I worrie about the day no new release is comming out and PHP will bring out a new release and all of my sites will going down....

please destroy my considerations I would very much apprichiate your comments.

kind regards

your stedy

...PostNuke relies on PHP to do its job, just like other CMS might use PHP, ASP.NET, J2EE, ColdFusion, ...

And those evolve over time as well, and they don't exactly maintain "default" compatibility over a longer period of time either.

An example : PHP moved from having default register_globals ON for 4.0.6 to default register_globals OFF today, which means that many PHP applications had to be adapted over the last year, to get them to run
on "default installations" of PHP again.

So if your site was happily working under PHP 4.0.6, you can probably still make it work under recent PHP versions, but that requires changing the default settings of PHP now, and perhaps some tweaking of the code where PHP's behaviour changed between 4.0.6 and 4.3.x.

Since PHP hasn't stopped evolving, if you install PN .723 today and don't touch it for 2 years, you'll probably have the same problems again when you decide to upgrade PHP in 2 years - because by then it will have changed something else, and new PostNuke versions will have adapted for that, but you won't.

And the same applies to any other CMS you might choose...

I'm not saying you should upgrade every time (except for security patches, depending on your environment), but the step from PN .6x to .72x is a *lot* bigger than from .71x to .72x. One or two intermediate upgrades might have made your life easier today :)

Hello Mike (i think so )

sounds clear what you replied to my post. How can I prevent me from this "stressed" updates? I mean is there a possibility to see whats changing in the code from postnuke which is related to the different PHP versions?

The question why I ask this is, to see if there is something like a roadmap, which gives me the possibility to double check it with my provider in advance before he does an upgrade.