Update PHP to version 5.5 or 5.6
Many users might see their providers disabling the support for PHP versions < 5.5 these days (Jan 2017).
If you might faced by this be relaxed. As far I can tell all older releases of phpwcms are working very well up to PHP 5.6. My oldest installation is phpwcms 1.1-RC1 — still up with only a few changes (as far I can remember).
In general there are a maximum of 2 little changes necessary. So keep an eye on your error reporting. If your website might render nothing than just a white page do not search…
Most times a phpwcms installation might fail is because of too restrictive PHP error reporting settings. Proof this at first. Current releases of phpwcms have no problem with this at all but older installations might report STRICT and DEPRECATED PHP errors. Technically follow PHP's recommendation. If you should have no access to php.ini or .user.ini read more about how PHP error logging can be enabled via .htaccess.
If you still have problems setting PHP error reporting using above methods open your config/phpwcms/conf.inc.php or for newer releases at include/config/conf.inc.php and place the following lines of code right after the opening <?php so it looks like this:
<?php
// Overwrite PHP error reporting
ini_set('display_errors', 0);
error_reporting(E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED & ~E_STRICT);
// -----
- Check if there is a special PHP handler setting in your .htaccess in case your website is still not running
- always switch to PHP version 5.6, if still not working try PHP version 5.5
- run PHP as CGI/FastCGI/FPM not as Apache module
There is a dev branch of phpwcms on GitHub that is compatible to PHP version 7.x. It's not yet recommend for production but it works. So give it a try.