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Who's still using an install of EE 1.6.x that's been spinning since June 2009, right now, today?

This guy.

And it's the lil' engine that powers the Tucson's Sentinel's news website — more than 40,000 stories that can see traffic of a million pageviews a week. It interfaces with platforms and services that weren't yet conjured up when it was installed — Apple News, for instance. (With a full set of logic that published, promotes, updates and takes down stories based on their state in EE.) And especially Cloudflare, where extensive caching and workers mean 90% of bandwidth is handled without ever touching the geriatric hamsters in our server.

And it runs on a version of php from the Late Middle Ages of the Internet. And has a core hacks file hundreds of lines long. And all along, I've been a big booster of EE, convincing other local news publishers to run with it instead of the bloated gack of WordPress or expensive custom platforms that come and go.

But as the Sentinel ticks off the months remaining toward legal adulthood, we've finally gotten around to the big lift we've been putting off since EE2 dropped about (checks watch, flips through calendar)... a long damn time ago.

We're upgrading, straight from 1.6.8 to 7.5.25.