Which version of Kirby can run on PHP 5.3.3-7?

Hi there,
I have a client that is using a rather older version of PHP. They are using the following:

cup@rza:~/public_html/cup/public/blooming$ php --version
PHP 5.3.3-7+squeeze3 with Suhosin-Patch (cli) (built: Jun 28 2011 13:13:26)
Copyright (c) 1997-2009 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.3.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2010 Zend Technologies
with Suhosin v0.9.32.1, Copyright (c) 2007-2010, by SektionEins GmbH

They are using a Debian Server and are saying it’s difficult to change the version of PHP they’re using for it so I might try to port over the site I made to an older version.

Thanks.

The minimum requirement for the current version is PHP 5.6, prior to 2.5.11 is was PHP 5.4. PHP. PHP version < 5.4 are not supported by Kirby 2.

The main reason why Kirby doesn’t support old PHP versions is that they no longer receive security updates. Using PHP versions below 5.6 may therefore expose the site and maybe the whole server to security risks.

Also, PHP 7 has enormous performance improvements. It therefore makes sense to upgrade directly to PHP 7.

If your client doesn’t want to compile PHP from source, there are also several Debian packages available that can be installed without manual work. You can find those by searching for the Debian version the server is running (Squeeze in this case) + “PHP7 package”.

Edit: Oh, it turns out that Debian Squeeze is also end of life and won’t receive any updates. If the server is publicly accessible (not just in an intranet) I’d strongly recommend upgrading the whole server to a recent Debian version or taking it down.

1 Like

The question is what is the reason why it is difficult to update. Is it because it seems to complicated to update to a newer version (then the solution suggested by @lukasbestle might help) or is it because they are running other stuff that doesn’t run on newer versions of PHP.

Maybe you can host the website on a different server.

Is that the project you linked to in another thread?

it’s this project:
http://kevincadena.com/cup

I handed it off to them to put onto their website as a subdirectory:
http://welcometocup.org

They don’t have a dedicated IT person on their team since their organization is art and design + community. We’ve mostly been talking via e-mail so I’m not sure why it’d be difficult to update on the back-end.

They also have a .com domain so we were probably going to host it on there and do a redirect from the .org to the .com since it’s the easiest though I’ll also let them know they should probably just upgrade.

Considering that their main website is running on such an outdated server, they really should. But they are also running a CMS I’ve never heard of and what the requirements might be.

Maybe you can run the new project on a subdomain of welcometocup.org and point this subdomain directly to the other server without a redirect from .com to .org.

Maybe it makes sense to host the website at a hosting provider instead of self-hosting. Then no one needs to maintain the server. Most of the time shared hosting is enough.

Economy is the CMS right?
it’s a custom CMS used by a well known web design/dev studio here in NYC for their projects:
https://www.linkedbyair.net/

Subdomain sounds like a good idea

@lukasbestle what do you mean?

He meant to put the website on a shared hosting server, instead of using the outdated server (if that is something they are maintaining themselves). But that would only make sense if the whole CMS was moved as well.