I am a relative newbie (but learning), maintaining a 13 year old WordPress site for a non-profit organization. The main components are a small wooCommerce store, The Event Calendar, s2Member and it was designed using Ultimate theme.
Most of the plugins are kept up to date, but The Event Calendar is stuck at 5.1 because the tech guy who oversees this several other sites says if we go to Calendar 6.x it would require a major re-write of the site.
I don’t doubt his word (have big respect for him), but am wondering how much of a potential problem this will be for the site.
In general, is it better to bite the bullet and have a redevelopment done? The users of the system are mostly non-technical people and I would worry any major changes in the look and feel would simply drive them away, even if it were for the better. Funding might also be an issue.
I also don’t want the site to fall over or become more susceptible to hacking if such a major plugin is allowed to become increasingly stagnant.
Your thoughts would be appreciated.
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We can’t answer this without knowing exactly what customisations were made to TEC. If they were done properly, using hooks and child theme templates, then there should not be any reason to not be able to update the plugin. I get the feeling that the customisations weren’t done properly.
You can easliy test it out by creating a staging site and test the updates on that version first to see whether updating to 6.x would break the site/cause issues. If that’s not something you’re able to do yourself then you’ll probably just need to have the tech guy sort it (or whoever your developer is).
My guess is that much of the site is old / outdated and wont support higher versions of PHP. If that is the case, then yes, eventually you will need to rebuild or it will become a security risk.
Sounds like the previous dev hacked up/forked The Event Calendar. Honestly, this is a pretty minor issue and can probably easily be brought into the current version. Your best bet is probably to document what you want Event Calendar to do and then hire a dev to fix it. The previous developer is not your guy for this work.