Upgrade php to 5.3 for Joomla 2.5

Learn how to change your hosting account from PHP 5.2 to 5.3 and fix errors with Joomla.

Steven Johnson
by | Posted: December 30, 2011 | Updated: June 11, 2013
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php-upgrade-52-53-250As time marches on so does the versions of php and Joomla and it is important to keep up to date. 

We recently took on the task of upgrading php to version 5.3 for our websites.  Since we host as so many different companies we decided to put this guide together to help others that may need to upgrade PHP at the different hosting companies.

Once you have upgraded be sure to clear any Caches and browse your website to confirm that all pages work correctly and no functionality has been broken.

 

Site5 PHP Upgrade

Site5 has a pretty easy upgrade to php 5.3 just add this line to the .htaccess file:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php53 .php

 

HostGator PHP Upgrade

 

 

A possible php5.3 conflict

One one of our Joomla 2.5 sites that also uses JReviews, we were getting 500 errors on the JReviews product review pages.

After working with the Alejandro, the JReviews developer, we learned that a new feature of Joomla 2.5 was conflicting with JReviews.  The new feature is the ability to process plugins on custom html modules.  All we had to do was turn off this processing of the modules and all worked well.

We are not sure why this new feature was enabled by default, since it is a new feature is probably should have been turned off.  Oh well we turned it off and all was well again.

Steven Johnson

Steven is a Joomla web developer and worked with Joomla since the Mambo days. He has built websites for startup businesses all the way to for Fortune 500 companies. A graduate of Georgia Tech in Chemical Engineering, he now happily spends his time building websites and reviewing all types of technology.