Sometimes your PHP version for your WordPress site may not be what you think it should be and this is despite the PHP version you have selected in your PHP Config in your Cpanel of your web hosting provider. I ran into this just this past week, where I was testing the new version of the EasyAzon plugin and it didn’t work for 1 of my WordPress blogs. This was despite it working fine on 4 other blogs on the same shared hosting plan. So 4 of the blogs worked fine, and looking at PHP Config you saw that PHP 5.4 (Single php.ini) was used which means every site should be sharing the same php.ini file that is in the public directory of the web host.
Well, the developers said it must be a PHP version issue, and I decided to test out the Display PHP Version plugin for WordPress which is free and recommended. This plugin simply modifies your WordPress dashboard so you see the PHP version under your normal status area.
It is easy to install, just click on Plugins -> Add New and search for Display PHP Version, the plugin is made by David Gwyer and is current version 1.2 as of this writing.
After it is installed and activated, simply look at your WordPress dashboard and you will see Running PHP Version underneath your WordPress version and other stats.
4 of my sites showed the correct PHP version 5.4.34 was running, but on my one site that had trouble with EasyAzon it was stuck with PHP version 5.2 and I could not find the source of this anomaly.
There were no PHP overrides or statements in any config files or cron, that I could find so I ended up opening a support ticket. This was a lesson though, if you are on a shared hosting provider solution and any hosting, there is a chance the PHP that the WordPress site is configured to is not the one that you have selected in PHP Config, so having a plugin like this that quickly just shows you PHP version can be handy and help with debugging problems or simply answering if you need to check plugin compatibility.
This is an original article from WP Cypher Copyright 2012
