Introduction In the ever-evolving landscape of web development, version control is not just a luxury—it is a necessity. While PHP has moved on to version 8.x with Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation and numerous performance improvements, a significant portion of legacy applications, enterprise systems, and academic projects still rely on older versions. One such version is PHP 7.1.3 .
; Allow short open tags? Many legacy apps depend on it. short_open_tag = On
date.timezone = "America/New_York" XAMPP 7.1.3 bundles phpMyAdmin 4.7.0, which throws deprecation warnings for create_function() . Suppress them by editing config.inc.php : xampp php 7.1.3
; OpenSSL extension=php_openssl.dll
LoadModule php7_module "C:/xampp-7.1.3/php/php7apache2_4.dll" AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .php PHPIniDir "C:/xampp-7.1.3/php" Then restart Apache. While XAMPP is excellent, here are other stacks if you need PHP 7.1.3: ; Allow short open tags
; Error reporting – turn OFF for production, but keep E_ALL for dev error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED & ~E_STRICT display_errors = On
: Restart Apache from the XAMPP Control Panel. Part 5: Running Legacy Applications on XAMPP PHP 7.1.3 Case Study: Old Moodle, Joomla 1.5, or Custom Framework Many older apps use mysql_* functions (deprecated in PHP 5.5 and removed in PHP 7.0). However, PHP 7.1.3 continues the removal—so you will need to refactor to mysqli or PDO . Suppress them by editing config
; Maximum execution time for legacy scripts max_execution_time = 180 ; Memory limit (many old scripts are memory-hungry) memory_limit = 256M
