[Isis-users] ABCD and PHP5.3

[De Smet Egbert]

Dear colleagues,

I have been experimenting with running ABCD in a PHP5.3 installation. PHP5.3 is out for quite some time now, comes by definition with any newer Linux installation and is e.g. also part of the newer WAMP-installations in Windows.Therefore we cannot afford sticking with PHP5.2 for long anymore, for sure.
Anybody else has been testing this and if so, with which results ?

I could give a more detailed report, but basically my finding is this : all of ABCD can work well, except the Site, where the metasearch (or the link to the filter-screen) results into empty screens due to a problem with the XML2tree library.
Mostly I had to work on the following, testing with PHP5.3.5 (but more testing will be necessary) :
- replace deprecated functions 'eregi' and 'split' by resp. mb_ereg() and 'explode()' in all scripts (mb_ereg however is also not accepted in all PHP-versions it seems... another example of the problematic PHP development).
- some smaller problems about undefined 'set-offs' (unexisting indexed of arrays) had to be solved or avoided
- php.ini settings are crucial and sensitive but can be transferred from the PHP5.2 one
- only the Site page is still problematic by resulting in empty pages when clicking on 'Search' or 'Filter'. As far as we can see this is due to a different result from the XML-parser in XML2tree.
This last problem is a major one as the Site is probably the most visible part of ABCD - to the end-users that is.
Any help or suggestions on how to tackle that problem would be most welcome...
It would be nice if we could prepare for a version 2.0 which is also PHP5.3 compatible !


Egbert de Smet
Universiteit Antwerpen