Most older ports will install with no problems – but a lot of the ports require files that are no longer where they used to be. Unfortunately the port installation fails if it can’t find a file (in my case the php5-extensions port was failing on the PDFlib-lite-6 install… grrrr)

I found a great little article on updating your ports – http://sig9.com/articles/ports-howto

I didn’t worry about performing the portdb updates as I did a system search for the files and they weren’t found.

Anyway – update your ports and then run them. This way you know you won’t waste any time chasing an compiling old versions of required packages.