I am using a shared host @ A2 Hosting and they use an Apache/FastCGI server model for PHP.
A recent rev of their PHP (to 5.3.22) caused seemingly random pages of my site to throw the error:
A PHP Error was encountered
Severity: Warning
Message: Please contact support about failure
Filename: libraries/Functions.php
Line Number: 679
This is the line wherein it states: return eval(’?’.’>’.$str.’<?php ‘);
Anywho, after 5 hours debugging, guess what the errant pages had in common?:
If they contained the characters “eval” anywhere in the template or in the called tags (e.g., in the {title} that was called) and PHP parsing was turned on, the error was thrown.
All the pages simply had content that included the work “evaluate”. Changing the word to “analyze” or “evacuate” fixes the issue. Random, or what?
I tested with a stock 2.6 install on this server and can reproduce the issue. If I install on my local box using Apache/Mod-PHP, then I can’t reproduce the problem.
Anybody have experience with this? It might not have anything to do with CGI vs. ModPHP ... perhaps another configuration option? Or maybe some CGI / eval lockdown code?