Since October 2011, 5 million lines of the PEAR codebase has shifted to github. Hand in hand with this shift has been the tireless work of Daniel C - someone who brazenly said "I will fix the failing packages!" in the tail end of last year.

As a result of his efforts a list has been created of known good packages to use with PHP 5.4. Other results include:

• All test infrastructure upgrading to PHP 5.4 release candidates
• All database driven test suites executing properly, catching a variety of simple bugs
• Hitting a point of "near zero" patches to be applied to unmaintained packages
• Increasingly, the PEAR QA team is delivering PHP 5.3+ friendly forks of existing packages

It is much easier to do a gradual migration. Start with one part of your application, and bit by bit migrate your logic and application. The traditional way of doing such migrations is to create a new project and have parallel development on the old and the new version of the application. The problem with this, though, is that when you make a change to your old application, you have to make the same change in the new codebase, essentially doubling the amount of work for each feature you need to implement. [...] You could wrap your old application into your Symfony2 application, and have different parts of your application be handled by different versions of your codebase.

With the help of a bundle he created, IngewikkeldWrapperBundle that handles the rerouting of your requests based on where the requested resource exists (in the Symfony 1 or 2 codebase).

While the existing PEAR packages will continue to use the pear.php.net distribution and bug tracking capabilities; it's never been easier to contribute to a PEAR package - simply fork; add your changes and send us a pull request. If your preferred packages aren't yet on github, please feel free to drop us a line on the pear-dev mailing list.

Here's more about the process to get the repository set up and how to migrate your package's current code from SVN over to github. The transition's pretty painless and can make the social development and improvement of your package a lot simpler.

I migrated only our open issues, and comments (and the comments ended up a bit weirdly formatted on the other end but this was the best they could do). It was nothing pretty or clever but in case it's useful to someone else.

The script connects to the github API and pulls down the information for the open issues including their titles, user and body of the issue. This is then used to make another connection for each to fetch their comments. The whole thing is dumped out to a CSV file that can be easily imported by the Jira team.

Now that PHP 5.2 is at the end of life, we are starting to migrate to PHP 5.3.

Things he mentions are:

• The deprecation of session_register
• The change of creating a new object by reference
• Other deprecated functions listed here
• His commands to upgrade his Zend Server instance from 5.2 to 5.3

IBM developerWorks has just published the first article in a series that Mark Nusekabel, Yan Li Mu and I wrote about our experience migrating a large PHP and MySQL application to DB2. In the four part series we look at preparation, switching databases, porting code, and finally deploying the application. This first installment covers the steps to plan and resources to consult when starting a migration project.

He gives links to a few other helpful resources if you're looking to make the move to DB2 like a redbook, a PHP developer's guide and an Amazon EC2 instance pre-configuured with IBM software.

Doctrine 2 is an implementation of the Data Mapper pattern, and does not force your model classes to extend an Active Record, nor to contain details about the relational model like foreign keys. [...] Note that you will have to run your application of PHP 5.3 for Doctrine 2 to work, mainly because of the use of namespaces in it.

He talks about some of the other differences including maintaining PHP classes and the metadata in them rather than just a YAML schema to map to your database. There's also a difference in how to interact directly with the Doctrine engine. Direct access has been replaced with a dependency injection approach.

After reading all the insightful comments on that post I've compiled a list with 10 steps to migrate your development team to an OO development team successfully. [...] With these 10 steps you are able to successfully migrate your team from a procedural team to an effective OO team.

The steps in the process are all important in their own right - things like "Ask yourself why you want to migrate", "Make a plan" and "Make some resources available" are important for starting out but doing the work and handling the aftermath are just as important. He recommends you "Document the lessons learned" and "spread the knowledge" out amongst the team for the best results.

As you might have noticed if you follow me on Twitter (which you should do as I make a lot of small announcements there), or if you monitor the Subversion activity closely, the Symfony 2 code is now hosted on Git. [...] So, from now on, all the development activity for Symfony 2 will take place on the new Git repository.

He briefly covers what git is and a resource (book) he used to help understand this recently popular version control system. If you don't want to learn a new version control system but still want to contribute back with the subversion knowledge you're already armed with, you can still use their svn mirror to get the latest releases.

Why Croogo? Because it's CakePHP based and it was released when I was at my most frustrated with WordPress. I'm really that easy. I wanted something Cake based so it would be easy to tweak. Plus it uses Cake's theme, which I already know, so I was able to convert the old WordPress theme (with a few updates) in about 5 minutes.

There's a simple three step process to make the switch that, fortunately, involves a plugin called Bye_Wordpress for Croogo that makes moving the contents of your blog a lot simpler. There are a few things to watch out for including database encodings, spam protection and there's a bit of code he includes to show how to map your old URLs to their new locations.