Legacy Original OctoberCMS stops working

Need Help
#1

Hey everybody,
I have an OctoberCMS install into the wild since it was a free and open-source project, and almost forgot about as it’s a simple and never changing website. Just a small personal—almost static—website with no profit coming out of.

With PHP moving forward, is seems like codebase becomes deprecated in some parts and stops working as a whole a few times ago.

My question is simple: Is there still a way to upgrade an existing OctoberCMS to a stable enough free version that would work with 7.3 or 8 PHP version? I frankly don’t want to start over with Worpress just because the original project turned commercial.

For nostalgia, if old enough people around, here’s the config:

{
    "name": "october/demo-theme",
    "type": "october-theme",
    "description": "Demo OctoberCMS theme",
    "keywords": ["october", "cms", "demo", "theme"],
    "license": "MIT",
    "authors": [
        {
            "name": "Alexey Bobkov",
            "email": "aleksey.bobkov@gmail.com",
            "role": "Co-founder"
        },
        {
            "name": "Samuel Georges",
            "email": "daftspunky@gmail.com",
            "role": "Co-founder"
        }
    ],
    "require": {
        "php": ">=5.4",
        "composer/installers": "~1.0"
    },
    "extra": {
        "branch-alias": {
            "dev-master": "1.0-dev"
        }
    }
}
#3

Hi @AndiKod

The website should continue to work indefinitely if you don’t upgrade PHP. However, if there is a requirement to upgrade, PHP has broken some things, and Laravel has moved on, which is problematic from a maintenance perspective and would indeed require an upgrade of October CMS.

October CMS does not offer a free version due to the high support demand from free users. Larger projects like WordPress solve this by socializing costs among the users. We are working hard to find a way to reach this balance, and if we are successful, a free version in some format may exist again.

An interesting part of the license is that you do not need to renew it for the website to continue functioning. So you could buy a license once, upgrade to PHP 8.1 and perhaps not need to upgrade again for another five years before arriving at this problem again.

Feel free to contact us for help with your unique circumstance: Contact Us - October CMS

#4

Discovered PHP in the 90’ so I bet I don’t really need that much support, just a core that can run with actual PHP versions. I was a huge fan of early OctoberCMS as an alternative to Wordpress, and here I am trapped with a CMS that turned commercial and sending me back to WP :slight_smile:

Thanks for answering anyway.

#5

Sure, no problem! Thanks for using October CMS in the early days.