CentOS - Apr 2014 - CentOS 5.10: Upgrading from IUS's php52 to CentOS's php53 questions

I would like to update one of the websites on my server from Joomla 1.5 to
Joomla 3.2, but it wants PHP 5.3. I am currently using IUS's php52 5.2.17,
which is fine for the Joomla 1.5 and the various WordPress sites (up to 3.9)
currently served on this server. I plan to test the update procedure on my
home (test) system (a pretty much identically setup system) before possible
breaking my public/production server, but wanted to get the 'wisdom' of
the
centos user-list: are there any gotchas I need to watch for. I presently have
installed:

php52-5.2.17-6.ius.el5
php52-devel-5.2.17-6.ius.el5
php52-odbc-5.2.17-6.ius.el5
php52-gd-5.2.17-6.ius.el5
php52-common-5.2.17-6.ius.el5
php52-mysql-5.2.17-6.ius.el5
php52-ncurses-5.2.17-6.ius.el5
php52-ldap-5.2.17-6.ius.el5
php52-dba-5.2.17-6.ius.el5
php52-mbstring-5.2.17-6.ius.el5
php52-snmp-5.2.17-6.ius.el5
php52-xmlrpc-5.2.17-6.ius.el5
php52-pdo-5.2.17-6.ius.el5
php52-cli-5.2.17-6.ius.el5
php52-pear-1.9.4-1.ius.el5
php52-xml-5.2.17-6.ius.el5
php52-imap-5.2.17-6.ius.el5



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