Tool talk: CiviCRM upgrades

CiviCRM released a security update last week. Here are a few issues I've helped my clients address after upgrading:

• Server memory:
  In some cases this newer version of CiviCRM may require more memory resources than your previous version. You may want to check your server logs for out-of-memory errors, and then adjust your memory limitations accordingly.

• Custom extensions incompatible with CiviCRM:
  This one came up on several sites this past week. Well-maintained and publicly distributed extensions probably don't struggle with this, but if you have custom extensions, you might find that they're causing errors because of changes in the parts of CiviCRM they’re interracting with. This is hard to anticipate before the fact, but when it happens, there should be a notice in your server logs or CiviCRM logs.

• Custom extensions incompatible with PHP 8:
  The newest versions of CiviCRM require PHP 8. If you've upgraded PHP to meet that requirement, you might find that some extensions occasionally cause errors. These are errors that even a thorough syntax check won't prevent, so again, you may want to check your server or CiviCRM logs for clues.

If you have a trusted CiviCRM partner or other outside expert maintaining your site, you can probably let them handle this.

But if you're hosting and maintaining it yourself, these are probably worth watching out for.

All the best,
A.