Top Catholic Songs – share, learn, promote

Some of you may have noticed that this Top Catholic Songs website was offline or erratic for a few hours on Thursday 1/6/22.  I was attempting to switch hosting to my home-based Synology Disk Station DS1513+ (an NAS – network attached storage unit). It did not go well. The Intel Atom Dual Core 2.13 GHz processor with only 4 GB of RAM cannot handle the demands of this Drupal 6 CMS (content management system).

So I switched back to SiteGround, a hosting company that has made the decision to soon end PHP version 5.6 service. They say that PHP 5.6 it is too old and they don't want to spend money on security maintenance. I am looking for a new hosting company that is willing to host older technologies. 

The problem is that when I switch this Drupal 6 website to PHP 7.x or 8.x, our self-hosted audio players disappear. Embedded audio and video iframes from external sites are unaffected (e.g. SoundCloud and YouTube). There is no fix for this other than hiring a developer to make the Drupal 6 audio modules run under PHP 7 and higher. I don't have the money to hire anyone and I don't have the skills to figure it out myself.

I did try to migrate this massive website to Drupal 7, and then 8, a couple years ago but the same audio player modules in question were never ported beyond Drupal 6.

This kind of breakage of modules or plugins is something that rarely happens with WordPress (which is the CMS I work with most of the time). 

Let me know if you have any ideas. I don't want to shut down TopCatholicSongs.com but it is getting harder and harder to keep it alive. This site was launched in November of 2007 and I took it over in January of 2014 (when Nick Alexander was ready to pull the plug due to a ton of spam comments and a lack of maintenance). I have appreciated very much the challenge of learning Drupal and keeping this historic content available to people everywhere.

Update 3/20/2022: I am close to completing a migration of this entire Drupal 6 website to InMotion Hosting. InMotion has not threatened to turn off PHP 5.6 – at least not yet. There are still some glitches to work out in the staging site. Soon this website will no longer be served up by SiteGround. Kind of sad because SiteGround had been reliably hosting TCS since 2007!

Update 3/30/2022: I have finally migrated this huge Drupal website from SiteGround (which is shutting down support for older PHP versions) to InMotion Hosting. It has been a struggle. The audio players seem to be functioning again. Note that it is much better to post your music or video using iframe code from YouTube, Spotify, ReverbNation or SoundCloud. That will make a future migration from Drupal to WordPress less of a challenge. See tip below for inserting an "iframe embed" into the Source Code editor. Please contact me if you see any glitches on this site. – Richard Schletty

Richard Schletty
TopCatholicSongs.com owner, editor and webmaster