Not in trouble at all.

Unless there are some compelling reasons to upgrade to 5.7, e.g. you _really_ need to use some of the new features, add-ons or are basically doing an overhaul, there's no need to go through a migration.

5.6 is very stable and will continue to run fine into the future, just consider it 'frozen' in terms of development. It's not going to suddenly stop working and security wise it's been heavily scrutinised (and continues to be updated occasionally).

The migration process isn't really an upgrade anyway, it's more a way to get lots of existing pages and content into a 5.7 site. Add-on and themes also need to be upgraded.

Just keep 5.6.x updated and backed up as normal.

Thanks! We will sleep better now... Was worried that somehow I missed the
memo.

There are a lot of existing sites that are happy sticking with 5.6.3.4 and many new site developments using it because it is stable, familiar, and has a big supply of addons and themes.

Yes, you really need to upgrade. Most developers are no longer supporting their 5.6 addons or developing new ones for 5.6.

5.7 uses newer technology and is forward-thinking. Sticking with 5.6 may be "safe" - for now. However, at some point will no longer be supported and as web hosts upgrade to newer versions of PHP in the future, your site could potentially break.

I can be hired to upgrade your site for you, which will mean rebuilding afresh in 5.7. If interested, send me a private message.

No. No trouble at all. I had a dialogue with Frz about support of the 5.6 version in the event of a serious security issue, and basically he said it would be fixed.

I still support a lot of 5.6 sites, and have no intention of migrating. There is simply no need. 5.6.3.4 allows the use of the MySQLi driver, since MySQL is deprecated in later PHP versions so you're good to go with c56/PHP5.6.

If you're interested in speed, then PHP7 is your friend. Unfortunately you'd need to migrate to 5.7 to use it, although I suspect work may be ongoing to get 5.6 PHP7 compatible. With new Linux distributions such as Ubuntu 16.04 supporting PH7 out of the box, it's kind of inevitable.

The only other reason to upgrade would be a killer addon available in 5.7 that you really really have to use. Then again, you might be better to look at back porting it to 5.6, rather than migrating to 5.7

Hi Jero,

My website stopped working yesterday showing : An unexpected error occurred.

My first thought was that PHP was updated from the server side, but when I went to check, here is what Ive found:
cPanel Version 90.0 (build 14)
Apache Version 2.4.46
PHP Version 5.6.40
MySQL Version 10.2.34-MariaDB
Architecture x86_64
Operating System linux

Do you have any ideo on what it could be?

Can you sign in to the site using /index.php/login? if so then go to the dashboard, then logs and see if there are any exceptions logged.

If not, can you open up phpmyadmin from cpanel, and have a look in the Logs table at the most recent entries and see if there is an exception logged there?

Also in cpanel, see if you can find an error log file and have a look at the last few lines.

One or the other of these should tell you what's going on.

Hi Jero,

Finally the hosting company fixed the issue. They did an automatic update of Mysql, and one of the add ons did not support it. Thats what they said, So they finally disabled it, and now everything is back to normal.

I have a question for you, in the error log file, I saw a recurring error that comes many times.

PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function query()... line 66

Any guess of what it could be??

Thank you

When I saw MariaDB was in use I did suspect that yu might have an issue with the tighter sql_mode that it uses by default.

Without the full error message it's difficult to tell what the query error might be but I'd take a guess that the database connection is failing and thus the query function is being run on a null variable rather than a database object.