development of large used application on php 5

On my free time I work on an open source application called phpCollab, a php based project managment software. I love that application, and I use it normally for my own work to manage my clients on differents works.

Actually the development is very slowly, the first reason is that all the developer are very busy with their paid jobs and the second one is that the code isn’t very easy to manage (it has a lot of library file and code redundancies).

phpCollab has grown a lot and with a lot of different parents, so now there’s a lot of hard-reading code without a single line of comment .

Quite a month ago during an hack for a client, I’ve decided, for the next third release [maybe in the year 2135.... ], to rewrite all the code using php 5 (with a DB layer like creole/propel), a modular/pluggable approach like WP and off course a lot of ajax.

For the latest two item there wasn’t a problem, but some of community members were not very happy about the use of php5. Actually the software has quite 2 thousands (known) installation around the world and a lot of them are on old server with php older than 4.4.x and the users don’t want to have problem with php 5 incompatibilities. Maybe php 5 (and its goodies) isn’t yet well suited for an application like phpCollab? Or a pragmatic php 4 OO rewrite is enought?

Does anyone has some case studies about php 4 to 5 software migration?

phpCollab community forum hacked (again)

This is the 4th time that the phpCollab community forum, based on phpBB plus, was hacked.

I’ve liked a lot that forum but actually I, and the other dev team members, cannot check every single day if a new XSS o bug is discovered and if there is patch to download, we’re too busy by our payed day job to working also on something different than the phpCollab development.

With the new releases of phpBB also the update/patching process is begone long and boring with a lot of files to move, rename, update..

Now I’m thinking to switch to another OOS forum, but I don’t know what, the community doesn’t need a zillion features forum, but needs something easy to manage, to use and to restore.

Any ideas? (oh, obviously I need to import all the old messages…)