Hi Wayne,
I know I don't really post here, but wanted to say I'm sorry to hear of your 'forced upgrade,' that's never fun :-( As you said, yes, AW is still on 1.x.
@thread
Migration of large databases to some 'random yet different, in odd and incompatible ways' is not 'an easy fix' as some of you seem to believe (even while Wayne has said it's not the case :-/ ). For something like your contacts or address book, that has half a dozen or so fields, sure, no problem. You'll have to trust Wayne and others with more CMS and DB experience when it's said - you do NOT want to see the DB schema for XOOPS - it's rather bizarre. Also, all of the 'features' modules as well. The more tables and fields there are, the more difficult it becomes to do any sort of 'easy translation' into another system.
And in this case (CMSes/forums, etc) - you'll find any potential system being migrated to, has it's own DB schema oddities to it, as well. Sure, *some* of it *might* be easy, but even for users, there's more data than just nick and password...Just the way forum sections are split out can be entirely different, let alone all the polls, news stories, profile data, etc etc etc.
Having said that, I've rarely seen too many issues in moving from PHP -> PHP5. You may need to do some tweaks for the php.ini file at worst, but the majority of PHP code 'just works' going from php4.x -> php5.x.
Someone (argo) looks like he even quickly stood up a XOOPS 2 instance in PHP5.
There can *always* be issues...and there usually are, and Wayne was being *nice* in raising 'there may be some issues ahead' to his users. Those of you saying 'oh, no problem, move to < something else >'.. I bet haven't actually *done* what they're proposing. It can be done, possibly with some lost data (polls, perhaps, other features, some user data from profiles can't be migrated, etc), but it can be, and usually is, a *lot* of work and time - test instances, lots of schema comparisons and writing transformation code, but even before that, *understanding* both the old and new schemas, triggers, odd looking table layouts that you normally never touch just running the site...
Anyways, good luck, Wayne - I hope it goes well.
