I read a post recently that drew attention to a significant difference between PHP 4 and 5. The issue was a 'register_long_arrays' setting that is 'off' by default in PHP 5, and that needs to be 'on' for XOOPS to work.

My host will probably upgrade sometime this year, so I wondered, are we going to get a version of XOOPS that runs without register_long_arrays 'on', or will it continue to be a system requirement for it to work under PHP 5?

The reason I'm asking is that if it's likely to remain a system requirement, I'm going to email my host now and ask what they plan to do about this setting when they upgrade.

In PHP5, register_long_arrays must be on in order for the old-style global arrays $HTTP_GET_VARS, $HTTP_POST_VARS, etc. to be recognized.

I don't think the current XOOPS core uses these ($HTTP_*_VARS), but I'm not sure. Even if the current XOOPS core does use these variables, I would expect that dependency to be removed in the near future.

But there are definitely third-party modules that still use the $HTTP_*_VARS arrays.

According to the PHP manual, register_long_arrays can be turned on (or off) in an .htaccess file, so that provides a workaround, provided that your server runs Apache and that Apache is configured to allow you to override PHP configuration values in an .htaccess file.

Many thx for clarifying that Dave_L. I'll hunt down the htaccess code to modify the setting just in case I have to.

I'm going to email our host anyway and ask them what their plans are. It would be nice to get a 'road map' from them so I knew when PHP and MySQL were going to be upgraded, but invariably they just go ahead and do it.