Support

Hello Mark,

"Your host needs to use PHP 5.3.10 or higher to run this version of Joomla!"

This error message comes from Joomla! itself. It tells you that you need to ask your host how to enable at least PHP 5.3.10 for Joomla! to run. Please note that Joomla! 3.3.0 and later require PHP 5.3.10 or later. It is advisable that you use PHP 5.5 or 5.6 since PHP 5.3 and 5.4 have already been end of life (no longer receiving security fixes) for 17 and 5 months respectively. The way to enable a specific PHP version as the default depends on your host. Therefore you need to ask them how to do it; unfortunately we can't help.

As to why this happened right after applying the wizard settings: one of the wizard options is enabling the default settings of the .htaccess Maker and generating a .htaccess file. Unfortunately you skimmed through the information in that section of the wizard and the troubleshooting section following it. This option generates a new .htaccess file, overwriting your existing one. Your host adds some special instructions in the .htaccess file to apply a specific PHP version on your site. Since this file was overwritten (per the warning in the wizard and documentation!) your host applies the default PHP version which is probably PHP 5.2. That's also why the restoration doesn't work. The solution was to simply rename .htaccess.admintools back to .htaccess per the troubleshooting instructions which were linked to in the wizard page, the ones it tells you to print out for reference if your site fails to load after applying the settings.

Moreover please note that the PHP version on your web server and the PHP version cPanel runs under are not related AT ALL. I know that's confusing. I consider this a massive failure in the cPanel user interface that's been annoying me ever since I started building sites...

What to do

1. Delete the installation folder. You do NOT need to restore your site.
2. Delete your existing .htaccess file using cPanel's File Manager. NOTE: You must check the "show hidden files" option when launching File Manager to see files whose name starts with a dot.
3. Rename .htaccess.admintools to .htaccess
4. Log in to the back-end of your site to confirm it all works
5. Install Admin Tools again without uninstalling it before. Please do it twice in a row, without uninstalling in between. This will fix the Admin Tools installation.
6. Ask your host what you have to put in your .htaccess file to activate PHP 5.5 on your site. It is typically a short line beginning with AddHandler
7. Go to Components, Admin Tools, .htaccess Maker and paste that line in the "Custom .htaccess rules at the bottom of the file" section
8. Now click on "Save and Create .htaccess" in the toolbar
9. If you still get a failure follow the first four steps to get access back to your site.

I verified through a configuration panel in Bluehost that they are using PHP 5.4.

No, sorry, this is simply NOT the case. Joomla! will only throw that error message when the effective PHP version is older than PHP 5.3.10. This cannot lie. If you want to see what is REALLY your PHP version please create a file called phpinfo.php which contains just this line:

<?php phpinfo();

Now call if from your browser by visiting http://www.example.com/phpinfo.php where http://www.example.com is the URL to your site. Please DO NOT use the URL of a different site on the same host. As I explained to you already the active PHP version is modified through the .htaccess file which is, of course, per site (and even per directory – you can go into that level of detail with .htaccess files).

You do need to get your host to confess which .htaccess directives you need to get the correct PHP version. Considering that Bluehost's support ranges between useless and dangerous (as in: they've charged clients to unhack their sites, said they're done and left the hacking script in place...) I can log in to your site and take a look at the .htaccess.admintools files to find that information for you. If you agree let me know so I can make the ticket private and ask for the necessary connection information.

1. Which folder IS the installation folder? Not comfortable guessing on this.

It's literally the directory whose name is installation. If you do not have that directory it's OK, no need to delete anything.

I did figure out that I can only see the .htaccess* files by searching. There is no option to reveal the hidden files, but I can search for them. However, that's where I stop, because I can't rename, edit or manipulate those files. I'll address that with the host.

Yes, you definitely need to do that to rename .htaccess.admintools back to .htaccess

5. How do I install again? Just point me to the page in the docs that I should be able to use. I'm assuming the Manual installation, right?

Go to our Download page. Download the software. It is a ZIP file. Log in to the administrator backend of your site. Go to Extensions, Manage. Click on the "Browse..." button. Find the ZIP file you downloaded. Double click on it. Click on the "Upload and Install" button.

You may have heard this: "I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you." :-)

Sounds familiar :D Don't worry, we're here to help.

There's also a huge amount of info that I hope will be of assistance down the road. Is it a security problem to leave the phpinfo.php script there? It seems to me it will be, and I'm going to delete it.

Yes, it's not a good idea having it public. Please remove it. When Joomla! is working you can access this information from the System Information page anyway.

I'm still unable to get in to edit .htaccess and I'm on hold waiting for support to respond to a chat session.

BlueHost never ceases to amaze me – in very negative ways :(

I'm wide open to switching to a better host. I paid in advance but it isn't so much money I'll cry if need be. I tried SiteGround and got my money back after about 48 hours. I'm OK with Blue Host, but they seem to be overwhelmed, and they bug me about as much as GoDaddy did. I don't want to host the site myself, but if there's an objective list of known good hosts I'd like to see it. I searched for a while before I narrowed down to three hosts, and Blue Host was one of those.

In no particular order, the hosts I usually recommend are Rochen, SiteGround and CloudAccess.net. They have different features and pricing models. I suppose that you were unimpressed with SiteGround's support. Their support quality dropped dramatically this past year and they are doing their best to fix it (I had a long chat with one of the owners and their CTO about it – I had my gripes with their support too). This leaves us with the other two solutions. It depends on your experience level. CloudAccess is targeted more to the beginners, Rochen is more power-user friendly. Not as cheap as BlueHost but either of them should be orders of magnitude better as far as server setup goes.