Concrete5.6.x still limping along

Developing with Concrete
1

Hey all,

in an ideal world all our old concrete5.6.x sites would have been by now replaced with nice shiny V9 versions, but due to all sorts of reasons we either still host or support a bunch.

Whilst they are not just legacy, they are a liability, but they still work, are fast, and can at least run on PHP7.4.

One of the sites I had to fix the other day was 15 years old, still even running eCommerce. Incredible. (yes, I’ve advised them multiple times about updating, etc, etc, etc)

But the reason for my post is that we’ve had a few cPanel servers update lately where MySQL has been updated, where ‘Group’ is now a keyword.

For these older Concrete sites, this broke them, as even in the latest 5.6.x release the word Group is used in a few queries without being quoted.

Fortunately, it’s a quick case of editing a file, putting in some quotes, and a site comes back up.

But to fix other instances in the codebase, the solution is to download the master branch zip, extract from that the concrete folder and swap that out with the live one. It’s still the same version, but the master branch had further fixes in it that didn’t make the last release.

So for anyone finding that their 5.6.x sites crashes after a cPanel upgrade, aim to run them on php7.4 and use the concrete folder from the master branch, to address any errors that talk about ‘Group’.

I don’t know what is involved about putting out a new release, and maybe I’m in a very small minority of fools that are still supporting it, but if someone is able to put out a new release with everything commit to date I reckon that might save someone a few headaches.

2

Thanks for the info, and yeah we have one or two clients still running 5.6

3

We also have at least 5–10 customers using version 5.6.4. I think some of them would be willing to pay for an update to PHP 8.

4

I do have a couple of 5.6 websites on PHP 7.4 but I control the server environment, so no surprise updates for me.

5

Yup - I do have a few 5.6 sites, and even …. a 5.4. I too control the hosting environment so it’s not such an issue but I have had to upgrade a few and it’s quite annoying to have to search and replace all instances of group before I can even begin to upgrade them.

It would be nice if there was a release that sorted this out. If the core team aren’t interested, is there any mileage in a community fork? It is open source after all.

6

I’ve got an old 5.6 site still working perfectly fine after 14 years - in fact it’s one of my most popular websites. I haven’t upgraded because I built a bunch of custom blocks for it, and re-building those for V8/9 is a big job, plus the migration process handling custom blocks hasn’t been smooth from my experience. Or maybe it’s just because this site has over 15GB of images in the file manager and the weight of the migration is crushing the server?

7

Responding in a personal capacity, not related to my work with PortlandLabs.

Someone has already put substantial work into modernizing concrete5, including dealing with the Groups issue.

It’s the Rebar project: GitHub - alecbiela/rebar: [Experimental] A Fork of Concrete5's Legacy CMS for the modern web developer · GitHub

Might be worth collaborating there?

8

We have several projects on Concrete CMS v5.6. When the closure of this branch was outlined, we made a fork in our local repository, it raised to the PHP 7.4 version, expanded Events, expanded Log (we needed the opportunity to significantly speed up the work of logging), and changed the trifles.

There was a project to raise the kernel to PHP 8.x, but there are so many problems that we choked in them and the project stopped, even Rector did not help.

9

One of the issues I had a while back with migrating sites, was that it didn’t migrate file sets. I wrote a small utility that basically extracted all the file information as a big lump of Json, and then imported just the file information into the V9 site. I copied all the files over by hand (using rsync) and then I went and imported all the content as normal. but ignoring any images. It’s important to ensure that the install of V9 does not have any content otherwise the assumption that the file IDs are unchanged breaks down.

If you go through the 5.6 site first and push any fiels not into a fileset, into a temporary one, it’ll bring ALL your files over.