My recommendations are:

Move to a CMS. Drupal has a large library community, and I have been
happily using it for ten years. You might find Joomla more to your liking,
or you could worship the claw and go to Wordpress, which is mammoth, but
not particularly developer friendly.

If a CMS is out of the question, consider using the Symfony framework,
which is similar in concept to Rails, but, IMHO, better constructed. I
think that it is the future of serious PHP development.

The great thing about using a framework is that it provides structure,
making it much easier to make the move to OOP.

FWIW, the forthcoming version of Drupal is built with Symfony and is the
start of Drupal's move from its "hook system" to more standard PHP
components, which will make it friendlier to PHP developers without
a Drupal background.

The ever-irascible Rasmus Lerdorf has declared that Drupal 8, paired with
PHP 7 will be unbeatably performant.

Cary

On Wednesday, April 29, 2015, Ken Irwin <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I've just learned that the PHP mysql_* functions are all deprecated as of
> PHP 5.5, and I'm trying to figure out what this means for my life. My
> library's website is heavily database-driven, hand-coded, and all written
> using the mysql_* functions. It's currently running PHP 5.4, so presumably
> code all needs to be updated before the next server upgrade.
>
> So I'm looking for a little advice:
>
>
> 1.       Is there a general consensus on what the best long-term
> alternative to the mysql_* functions is? I see a bunch of references to the
> PDO extension, which is available on our server. Is that The Answer, or
> should I be looking other places as well.
>
> 2.       Does anyone have advice about how to proceed with an enormous
> overhaul like this? I'm sure I'll be working on a development copy of the
> server until everything is all worked out. But beyond that, advice would be
> welcome. Have you employed students to do work like this?
>
> 3.       I wonder what other broad-sweeping old-fashionednesses may also
> be about to rear up and bite me. If you imagine that I learned procedural
> (almost never object-oriented) PHP 4 in about 2000 and am slow to change my
> ways, can you predict what sort of deprecated foolishness I might still be
> perpetrating?
>
> Any advice, input, or experience would be appreciated!
>
> Thanks
> Ken
>


-- 
Cary Gordon
The Cherry Hill Company
http://chillco.com