ELGG is a pretty nice open source social networking package. But it’s relatively new, and installing on Dreamhost causes problems, I got an error message saying that it doesn’t support PHP4, even though Dreamhost runs PHP5.
It seems that the check for php5 is done in the .htaccess file, and somehow it doesn’t recognize that Dreamhost runs PHP5.
To fix the problem, comment out these lines in the .htaccess.
# php 4, apache 1.x
#<IfModule mod_php4.c>
# ErrorDocument 500 “Elgg error: Elgg does not support PHP 4.”
# RedirectMatch 302 .* index.php
#</IfModule>
# php 4, apache 2
#<IfModule sapi_apache2.c>
# ErrorDocument 500 “Elgg error: Elgg does not support PHP 4.”
# RedirectMatch 302 .* index.php
#</IfModule>
Peter Van Dijck 
Thank You very much!
I had this problem in DreamHost.
Salu2
Hey Peter, Thanks for putting this out there. I also had problems with Dreamhost (even though, after much searching, I discovered they’ve disable PHP 4 since Sept 2008). Another little known fact is that the .htaccess file is by default named “htaccess_dist” in the current Elgg installation.
O
Thanks. This definitely got rid of the “Elgg doesn’t support PHP4” error message, but that changed to “Elgg couldn’t connect to the database using the given credentials “, although the details in settings.php are accurate. Perhaps it is because the database is empty. Do I need to import a database from somewhere else?
Thanks,
Dave.
I made the change and I’m still getting the error.
Elgg error: Elgg does not support PHP 4.
trying to install elgg1.5 on dreamhost and during setup I get a data folder not writeable message , pretty sure I made it 777 writeable.
I put it (the empty dadt folder I created per txt) in the elgg folder is that the wrong place