PHP 5.2.4 was release on August 2007 and became end of life on January 1st, 2011. We are no longer supporting it. Furthermore, PHP versions 5.2.3 up to and including 5.2.6 were extremely buggy. Even though Joomla! supports them, we found that in actual reality some core features displayed erratic behaviour, third party extensions didn't work properly and our own backup and restoration scripts could throw errors which were not bugs in our software but caused by bugs in PHP.
If your client insists on sticking with a host which is using a 5-year-old, buggy, end-of-life, unsupported PHP version you'll have to go through the scenic route in order to restore their site. The scenic route being the fully manual method described in "
Unorthodox: the emergency restoration procedure".
Please let me reiterate: PHP 5.2.4 is a
VERY BAD CHOICE for a live site. Let's forget the fact that it's easy to hack. Let's forget that it causes myriads of problems. It's also the safest bet to NOT being able to update the site, therefore mathematically leading to it being HACKED. All major components dropped or are about to drop support for PHP 5.2. Joomla! 3.x drops support for PHP 5.2. In 6 months you will be left with no upgrades and possibly no upgrade path for the site's extensions. Within 9-12 months your site's software will become outdated, unmanageable and vulnerable.
Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
Lead Developer and Director
🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!
