| My thoughts are have been summed up pretty much by others already, but to reiterate:-
- Having two osC sites that are critical to my business, and most definantely will not work on mysql 5, plenty of notice will be required. The later the better really from a "if it aint broke dont fix it" point of view. However, knowing that change is inevitable and that I will have to remove my head from the sand at some point, I just need to know well in advance when its going to happen.
- As Canuckster has said, if there is any possiblilty of a means of testing, this would be very welcome. I believe that it has already been mentioned that this may not be possible or practical, so it may be a case of testing on a local setup. Which again means more time to test so plenty of forward warning will be nice.
- With the above in mind, timing would be most important to me. Any change around the christmas period would be disastrous for online retail sites. This time next year would be about the best from a purely personal opinion.
To backup up the other feedback thread, I think UH's handling of the change to php5 has been outstanding. The roadmap for the event was laid out way in advance, giving site owners ample time (at least 8 months I believe) to prepare. The fact that UH set up the .htaccess method of switching between php4 and 5 was a great benefit to me and meant that on Monday mornng the only thing I had to do to get my osC sites live was change register globals to on. I was very surprised to read on this forum how many site owners were caught out by this and have a great deal of sympathy with the UH support team for having to deal with all the support tickets..... What more they could have done to prepare their customers I dont know. I had in fact prepared myself for some downtime on my sites due to the changeover and broken scripts but this was not the case at all, as the testing with the .htaccess obviously worked fine.
With this in mind, although changing to mysql 5 means more testing and extra work, it may well mean that I can use it as an excuse to look for alternatives to osC and/or factor it in with complete redesign of my ecommerce sites. So long as there is plenty of advanced warning, as there was with the php upgrade.
Either way, after the recent php upgrade I have plenty of faith in the UH team in implementing the change and appreciate the information and support they provide before and after the changes when needed.
Cheers,
Rich |