This is merely a heads-up, reminder, cautionary tale, whatever you want to call it – but I seem to forget about it until something breaks and then after a few it dons on me that this is probably the problem. See I get so use to the servers I use at my day job, the ones that are custom built with CentOs running php5 and all the good stuff. I never have this problem.

So, and this applies to more than just 1and1 I’m sure. I’ve run into this on other hosting services – and I guess their are other ways to resolve this, but I’m going to start with my way.

So like I said, I’m use to what I have at work, PHP5. I base everything off that and this of course spills over into my contract work. So tonight I’m working on a project and I’m uploading it and trying to get it running. All I see if a odd error from adodb, missing a ending “}”. So I recopied it to the server, same thing, so I erase the entire adodb dir and try again. Still the error. So I start back tracking and spitting out all the errors I can to try and track this down. Because it’s sure as heck not a problem on my local machine.

By this point my brains chugging away. One thought leads to another and so on, and it occurs to me that my dir is named adodb5, because it’s for php5, then it starts to seem familiar – I’ve run into this before, using php5 on another site and having weird errors and functionality issues. So then I use the magical Google search engine (yes we’ve decided at work, everything internet related is magical, it runs on purple horseshoes, green diamonds, yellow moons, etc…I’ll have to snap a shot of diagram we have at work). Viola! You need to edit, or add a line to your .htaccess file for it to work.

It’s simple…

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

and your done…see simple. Now the hard part is to remember this…

Man I can’t wait till online hosting upgrades to php5…