Having been shying away from all this new stuff for some time, having started with tikiwiki and porting over to bitweaver, I’ve had most of what I needed 25 years ago. Those sites are still running fine and have been upgraded to PHP8.4 and Nginx. It was always my intention to add extra features that nextcloud supports, but I only ever got as far as specialist packages for such functions as key holding, security patrol tracking and other specialist tools.
So why change things? Simply because I need better access to 30+ years worth of email history from both my linux desktop and the mobile devices. While thunderbird has done a sterling job over the years, I can only search the 40Gb of archive from the desktop, and increasingly I could do with access from the tablet, which I am hopeful that nextcloud will provide. Some key modules on bitweaver still throw errors on php8.4 so moving to a platform that is clean already is a logical step.
Initially I simply pulled a clone of nextcloud from github, the current v33 build, and everything worked fine using sqlite3, but moving over to postgres was more of a problem! Long story short, I’ve now got V32 running in parallel with V33 and after a number of false starts with both occ and postgres, I now have V32 working with a postgres database. One little hickup was ‘viewer’, which is not part of the main git repo, but once I added that to /apps/ from it’s separate repo the migration completed fine. So now I need to work out how to access the thunderbird email archive from nextcloud …
Being a long time user of firebird has been another reason for not moving things over, and doctrine is another brick wall I may need to scale, but at least the doctrine-firebird-driver seems to work which is better than the lavarel one. I have ADOdb and Smarty running happily on PHP8.4 ( and not seeing problems with 8.5 ) but what I have played with so far seems to be easier to handle than other options I have tried so I just need to bed down just what I can move, and what needs to stay on the bitweaver sites … https://medw.uk has the most content and I’m not sure yet if I can run the blogs and wiki from sites like Nextcloud - MyHomeCloud which was registered back when I had owncloud in the todo pile ![]()