Drupal 7 required PHP 5.2. It doesn't like PHP 4, or 5.1. (Did PHP 5.3 compatibility get into D7?)

If your server is running one of the versions of PHP that D7 doesn't like, I believe right now it spits out a bunch of errors — errors that will frighten / frustrate people who don't know much about servers or PHP. You can see such confusion on #686196: Meta issue: Install failures on various hosting environments. Many people wil assume that Drupal is broken if they encounter such errors, rather than understanding the problem is caused their server's configuration.

What if instead, Drupal did a quick check during the install process to see which PHP version is running (much like it checks to see if the settings.php file is correctly in place). If a person has anything besides PHP 5.2.x+, the Drupal installer could display a helpful message, briefly explaining that Drupal 7 requires PHP 5.2.x or greater (or 5.2.x period if 5.3 doesn't work) and that they need to 1) change the version of PHP [link to info], or ask for help from their hosting company; or 2) switch to another host, [link to suggestions on d.o].

Comments

berdir’s picture

berdir
Primary language German
Location Switzerland
commented
Title: Display helpful message when attempting to install on a server with php 4, php 5.1, or php5.3+ » Display helpful message when attempting to install on a server with php 4, php 5.1

(Did PHP 5.3 compatibility get into D7?)

Yes. Same for Drupal 6.

I think there are already issues about this...

catch’s picture

catch
he/him
Primary language English
commented
Status: Active » Closed (duplicate)

Yes this is a duplicate of #299308: Installing Drupal by visiting index.php (rather than install.php) leads to a fatal error when PDO is not enabled and #722974: Install script returns a blank page for PHP4, PHP 5.1 (should display *something* instead). There's also a couple of more general issues but can't find them now. See you over there!