How to downgrade PHP 5 to PHP 4

[lboria]

Can someone help with the best way possible to downgrade our Plesk 8 running PHP 5 to PHP 4 about 90% of our sites has scripts that require this version of PHP.

Please give detail steps.... thanks

 

[lboria]

bump

 

[kenped]

I'm not a plesk guru or linux, but i do php programming,,

I would basicly look for the config file of php .. I would install php as a package ,, then edit the main config file to load the module

LoadModule php4_module modules/libphp4.so

something like that: I would also check the AddType to make sure that the file extensions to be loaded reflects php4.

But hey again DONT TAKE IT TO THE BANK just a suggestion

-ken

 

[perfectpenguin]

It's maybe not as bad as it seems...

Hi, Just my take on this for anyone that's stopping by here. I too was searching for info on this having just been forced to upgrade our server following a hack. A lot of our sites we're broke following the upgrade which I blamed largely on incompatibility with PHP5.

However, for anyone in the same position, I'd first suggest doing the following and then seeing how many issues are fixed:

1. Make sure you have PHP_SAFE_MODE OFF in plesk, at domain level (if the site is not causing you a problem, leave it on, though)

2. Edit your php.ini, look for 'register_long_arrarys' and set it to on. This gives you backwards compatibility with the old $HTTP_*_VARS which no longer exist in PHP5.

Finally, if you're still getting odd stuff or just blank screens, dig into /var/www/vhosts/domain.name/statistics/logs/error_log and get some hints from there.

This has ireoned out 90% of my problems - I hope it can do the same for you.

Cheers,

Simon

UPDATE:
After making any of the above changes, don't forget to restart apache.

Also, other stuff I found that PHP5 doesn't like which was previously fine in PHP4:
1. Declaring a variable name more than once in a class (sometimes just a genuine mistake by the developer - check your error logs).

2. including and/or requiring files: seems to be a very random problem but sometimes files which are well within the open_basedir restrictions just will not include - the error logs will hint to this if it happens. Good work around if all else fails:

<?php include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/path/to/file/from/httpdocs/includename.php'); ?>