I am trying to help someone out who has CMS v1.4 and I would like to know if this will run on 5.3+ which my server is running in order for me to be able to update the CMS?

CMSMS < 1.7 will probably NOT run on PHP 5.3.
CMSMS > 1.9 will NOT run on PHP 4.

If a < 1.7 site is currently running, then I would
a: duplicate the site inside a subdirectory on that install.
b: upgrade the site to 1.7 or 1.8
c: verify that everything is working properly
d: duplicate the site to a PHP 5.3 server
e: continue the upgrade process.

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Thanks Robert. Will all versions run on php5.2.17 ?

I can't even login to their CMS admin even though I have reset the password in the db. Their current PHP is 4.4.9 cms is 1.4.1

I don't think all versions won't run on php 5.2... we ended (officially) support for php 4 in CMSMS 1.6.x and required php 5.2.x minimum after that...

I have no recollection if older versions of CMSMS will run in newer versions of php, but I would doubt it.

if you can't get into the admin section then I think they have something else wrong, which you will have to diagnose first.

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I found an old announcement from calguy regarding CMS1.7
it says as from 1.7 PHP4.0 is not supported anymore, and also some changes have been made for PHP5.3 compatibility.
This implies that CMS1.6 is probably not (fully) compatible with PHP5.3.
So you might need to make an extra step, upgrading from CMS1.6 to CMS 1.9.4.3 on a PHP5.2 server.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=42573

Issue with not being able to login was because of the session.save_path being incorrectly set to a none existent directory. Changed the setting in php.ini to /whatever/your/document/root/is/tmp/cache/session