[Plugin: Breadcrumb NavXT] Activating Plugin results in Fatal Error

The problem was I was running PHP Version 4.3.9 and not 5…

But I got this message:

Your PHP version is too old, please upgrade to a newer version. Your version is 5.1.6, this plugin requires 5.2.0

And my blog breaks too

The message is now there as a convenience to avoid the parse error from showing up. From the message, you can see you need PHP 5.2.0 or newer for Breadcrumb NavXT, WordPress 3.2 will have a similar requirement. The version of PHP you are using is more than 4 years old:

Version 5.1.6
24-Aug-2006
* Fixed memory_limit on 64bit systems. (Stefan E.)
* Fixed bug #38488 (Access to “php://stdin” and family crashes PHP on win32). (Dmitry)

https://www.php.net/ChangeLog-5.php#5.1.6

Please upgrade to a newer version of PHP 5

Ouch. Thanks Mtekk

This plugin just took my blog offline completely without warning. After updating the plugin it completely locked me out of my control panel. This is totally unacceptable. The only way I could disable it was to connect by ftp and delete the breadcrumb plugin folder.

The excuse that our php version is too old is a joke. All my other dozens of plugins work fine with it as does WordPress itself. How can an author update their plugin to require a certain version of php and then completely take down the blog when it finds an older version?

I’ve now had V5.2.16 installed and get exactly the same error

The excuse that our php version is too old is a joke. All my other dozens of plugins work fine with it as does WordPress itself. How can an author update their plugin to require a certain version of php and then completely take down the blog when it finds an older version?

It is not an excuse, and most certainly not a joke. Due to time constraints, I only support modern installs of PHP (5.2 or newer) and WordPress (3.0 and newer). WordPress 3.2 will require PHP 5.2, so it is time to migrate. As stated before PHP versions prior to 5.2 are over 4 years old. And, you really *should* be using PHP 5.3.x.

Technically, the only reason why there is an issue here is because WordPress does not auto deactivate a plugin that calls die() on activation. Not exactly my fault, but ends up being my problem and has been fixed in the SVN Trunk version (still requires PHP 5.2 or newer, still gives the warning, automatically deactivates to prevent accidentally killing the site).

I’ve now had V5.2.16 installed and get exactly the same error

What does the error say?