Find out if Drupal 6 can run on PHP-5.6

[zooey]

Upgrading vmweb to openSUSE-13.2 would change php from version 5.4 to 5.6.

As our Drupal6 instance is already exhibiting problems with php-5.4 (it fills the logs with messages about deprecated constructs), it could be that it causes more problems or even complete failure with php-5.6.

So we need to find out if Drupal6 can run on php-5.6 and if/how any related problems can be circumvented.

[jprostko]

I haven't tried yet, but Drupal 6 will likely not work with PHP 5.6. I maxed out all of my Drupal 6 installations to PHP 5.3.29, since tons of things break with PHP 5.4, and you get lots of strict warnings (which you can get around using something like the ​Disable Messages module or modifying the E_STRICT error reporting in php.ini). The main issue isn't necessarily Drupal 6 itself, but contributed modules will often show problems where they outright destroy the page layout by them breaking, and perhaps doing much worse than that.

You can go through and update the code to work with more recent versions of PHP, but naturally this is a lot of work. I was actually going to go through my site at work to do this, but never did, assuming I'd just wait to update PHP once I migrate to Drupal 7 or 8 (or another CMS).

If you want though, I can try to do a vanilla installation of Drupal on PHP 5.6. I suspect it will not work well or at all though. If it does, I can check to see if Haiku's current site implementation will work with PHP 5.6 or not.

[waddlesplash]

We've moved off Drupal, so we don't need to worry about this anymore. The only other thing on our infrastructure which uses PHP (the Userguide Translator) now (as of last week) has been tested on PHP 5.5 through 7 as working.