Upgrading from vB 2.2.6 and PHP 4.2.3 to vB 3.6.x and PHP 5.x

[Wally Hartshorn]

We're running a rather ancient version, vBulletin 2.2.6. (We're just using it on a company intranet, so we didn't have any compelling reason to upgrade.)

For other reasons, we're wanting to upgrade our PHP from 4.2.3 to 5.x. However, when we upgraded PHP, we found that vBulletin no longer worked entirely correctly. (We could login and view messages, but we couldn't post new messages or login to the admin control panel.)

We've rolled back PHP to 4.2.3 and now want to upgrade vBulletin to 3.6.x. However, vBulletin 3.6.x appears to require PHP 4.3.3 or later. *sigh*

So we have three options:

1. Upgrade PHP to 4.3.3+, then upgrade vBulletin to 3.6.x, then upgrade PHP to 5.x. That requires upgrading PHP twice, which is sort of annoying.
2. The other is to upgrade vBulletin to some magic version, then upgrade PHP to 5.x, then upgrade vBulletin to 3.6.x. That requires upgrading PHP twice, which is still annoying, but less so than upgrading PHP twice. By "magic version", I mean a version of vBulletin that will work with PHP 4.2.3 and will work with PHP 5.x. Does such a version even exist?
3. Upgrade PHP to 5.x, then upgrade vBulletin to 3.6.x. This would be the best option. However, this only works if all of the older upgrade scripts (e.g. the one that will take us from 2.2.6 to 2.2.7) will work with PHP 5.x, even though the old version of vBulletin being upgraded won't. Does anyone know whether that is the case?

After this, I promise we'll never let our vBulletin get this far out of date again!

[Steve Machol]

You should be able to upgrade to vB 3.5.7 with PHP 4.2.3. Then upgrade PHP once and upgrade vB to 3.6.4.