One of the downsides of being solo (and by nature cheap) is that you have to do your own sysadmin. I don’t mind it really and I’m fairly competent but not doing it often and not having spare servers around to practice on means that doing big upgrades is always a bit scary. Well I ran into some minor roadblocks on a few different projects I wanted to work on and they kind of forced my hand in doing some system upgrades that I’d been putting off.
MySql to Version 5
photo credit: chadmillI’m using CakePHP on one of my projects and it had some issues with the version of MySQL I was using. CakePHP is a PHP framework that includes an object to relational mapping component and the code that it generated for deleting an entry was giving MySQL errors. A bit of research pointed to MySQL 4 as the problem so I figured it was time to upgrade my MySQL installation. After of course backing up everything twice this was just a quick couple clicks in WHM and went off without a hitch.
PHP to Version 5
Another thing I wanted to try my hand at is a Facebook application. While you can do Facebook applications in PHP 4 the tutorials and libraries I was looking at were all oriented to PHP 5. And let’s face it, PHP 5 has been around for a long time and 4 (while it does seem to still be very widely used) should have gone away a while ago. I figured I’d better upgrade to PHP 5 before PHP 6 became the current release. This mostly went off without a hitch as well. In WHM you upgrade PHP through re-building Apache with the EasyApache tool. One tip - if you’re need FreeType support in PHP you’ll want to check the TTF option in the full options list. The FreeType option in Cpanel used to be listed under FreeType and it took me a while to figure out where it went.
Aside from the fact that I forgot that I needed the IonCube loader for one site this was mostly another easy upgrade. For some reason though the new Apache config pointed the DocumentRoot for my main site to a different directory. I kind of hacked my way around that by sym linking that directory to the old one. Probably not the correct solution but it worked and I was tired of messing with it.
WordPress to Version 2.5
The last upgrade was the easiest - updating WordPress to the just released version 2.5 was completely painless on 3 of my 4 WordPress installations. On the 4th installation I got some errors in the theme that was preventing me from loading the admin screen. Though to be fair I think the issue was created by something I did before attempting the update. Luckily this was a development only installation and I just wiped it out rather than spend too much time messing with it. It did raise a question I should probably find out though - how do you change the theme that WordPress is using if you can’t get into the admin screen? I took a quick poke around the WP database but didn’t see it.
I did need to update my PhotoDropper plugin - the new version uses a different AJAX library - and it took a bit of effort to find the “upload” functionality which used to be a box below the post and is now a little “add media” button in the post title bar.
Upgrading My Habits
The biggest thing I’ve been working on lately is upgrading my work habits. In recent days I’ve had a hard time getting good work time in because of family stuff and an overload of errands. I’m trying to really buckle down now and get some development work in on a idea I’ve been tossing around for a long time without doing anything. It’s not a huge project - pretty simple really - and I’d probably be able to crank it out in a few days but I wanted to take this opportunity to work with CakePHP. Both because I think Cake will be a good learning experience for me and because I think if I get proficient at Cake it’ll make future projects much faster. More on the project and Cake in the future.