Question

I manage a CakePHP 1.1 CMS website, and our hosts just upgraded PHP to 5.3, causing a number of errors, such as:

Notice: Undefined variable: banner_image in /home2/intiwara/cake/app/views/layouts/public_site.thtml on line 49
Notice: Undefined variable: news_menu in /home2/intiwara/cake/app/views/articles/volunteer_animal_refuge.thtml on line 73

I can hide the errors by altering cake/cake/libs/configure.php line 133 to be:

error_reporting(E_ERROR);

However the variables and models are still not found so the page does not render.

I realize I need to upgrade to CakePHP 2.1, and every post I find dwells on this. However I’m the only technical volunteer here, I have only a few hours tomorrow afternoon to get the site working, then I am offline for two weeks’ work in rural Ethiopia, so I’m hoping there’s a ‘workaround’ solution I can put in place in the meantime. (The hosts didn’t tell us this was about to happen..)

I don’t need the admin functionality, I don’t mind hiding errors – I just need the site to render. Is there any way I can trick PHP 5.3 to ‘see’ these variables?

Thank you hugely
Chris

Answer 1

If you followed the conventions you might have some luck and be able to upgrade to 1.3 withing a reasonable amount of time if you have a higher level of experience with CakePHP. From 1.1 to 2.1… this won’t go that smooth.

Without knowing the whole code and all the issues it’s hard to tell anything, it’s not even really possible to say if it would be better to try to work around with fugly fixes or to do a proper upgrade to 1.3.

If this is really something mission critical contact me in private and I’ll get you the contact to a company who can get it done.