For the somewhat technically savvy, the title of this post may seem like an oxymoron: Joomla 3.x should run very well on any PHP version ranging from 5.3.10 through version 7! So why should it have a problem with PHP 5.5 (or higher versions of PHP)?
To answer this question, let us tell you a little story…
Around midnight, a client emailed us and told us that he can’t run his Joomla 3.4.8 website on PHP 5.5 (which is his host’s default), and that he has to add the following line to his .htaccess file in order to make his Joomla website work:
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php53 .php
The above code ensured that the PHP version used to power his Joomla website was 5.3.29, which worked for our client, but he didn’t (and rightly so) want to remain on a no longer supported PHP version.
The first thing that we did when we started working on the website was removing the above line from the .htaccess file, and the moment we did that, the website displayed the infamous Internal Server Error page. The client, in his email, told us that the problem was caused by an extension called HotSpots which (again, according to our client) did not work (for some reason) on PHP 5.5. So, we disabled that extension, and still, we had the same problem.
We then disabled all the 3rd party extensions, one by one, until we were left with only the core extensions (we even switched to a core template), but still, we had the Internal Server Error page on the frontend.
Naturally, we checked the Apache error log, which revealed nothing, since the client was on a shared hosting. We expected though to get the server logs from the host, but they (the host) refused to share them us, so we had to fix the problem ourselves.
We then started debugging the entry index.php file: we started, as usual, by adding a die(‘Under Maintenance); code to its very beginning. To our surprise, the Internal Server Error remained even after adding the die line to the beginning of the index.php file. So, we thought it was a problem with the file permission, but, unfortunately, it wasn’t (the permissions were set to 644 on the index.php file, and the file ownership was correct). So, we just thought that this file was jinxed, and we created another file, called test.php which contained the following line:
<?php die('Under Maintenance'); ?>
Unsurprisingly, when we tried to load the test.php file from the browser, we were greeted (again) with the Internal Server Error page.
At this point we started suspecting the host: perhaps the host’s PHP 5.5 version is corrupt, and all their clients think that the problem is on their end, and so they add that .htaccess line to run their websites under PHP 5.3, but, we then quickly dismissed that idea since we had another client on the same host who didn’t have this problem.
Only after hours of searching that we discovered the root cause of the problem: there was a php.ini file, placed under the root directory of the Joomla website, which was only compatible with PHP 5.3. Renaming the php.ini file to php.ini.old immediately solved the problem!
If you are seeing an Internal Server Error on your Joomla website when you are using PHP 5.5, then check the root directory for a php.ini file (or a .user.ini file), if you have one, then just rename it to php.ini.old (or .user.ini.old) and see if that fixes the problem. If it does, then you’re welcome! If it doesn’t, then please contact us, we’ll solve the problem for you in very little time and for very little money.