Support and OpenSource

I know that I am not an OpenSource expert and to be completely clear: I do not want to complain at all but I would definitely think whether I would bet my company’s business processes on it… Let me give you my story:

March this year I migrated my blog from a SharePoint based solution to an OpenSource solution and never ever regretted it. I actually enjoy it. I described the whole migration here: Migrating My Blog. I enjoy all the different possibilities WordPress is giving me and by running on Windows Server 2008 R2, I am easily able to operate it.

So far, so really good – but… I now wanted to upgrade PHP to the latest version and I failed. I installed it, made sure that the php.ini file is back in place, restarted the machine and:

Since then I tried everything: Removing all my plug-ins, trying to look at the PHP log (which was accidentally switched on, grew tremendously but when I needed it, nothing was written in there) etc. etc. – no success. Luckily, I run my blog in a Hyper-V environment, which allows me to take a Snapshot and then fall-back to configuration I know that it works.

I started to post in the wordpress.org forum and did not get any response so far.

So, honestly, for my blog it is ok and as I said above, I do not want to complain as I did not pay for it and it is really cool stuff! But it is not business critical (even though I see a fair amount of hits every day – thanks to you all) but if I would have to run my business on it, there are two options: Either I hire a team, which has in-depth knowledge of the stuff or I just hope (which is probably not a good option for a business).

I am just a little bit frustrated. At the moment I am back to the working environment and will take another try, once I find some time to drill down further (or get a good idea from the community).

Roger