Pete McWilliams

I officially changed to using PHP 5.3 for local development quite some time ago. I occasionally need to work with older projects that don’t run so well without a few adjustments. Magento versions prior to 1.4 need a little help when running on PHP 5.3. I would take a look at the Migrating to 5.3.x to get familiar, but to get going quickly just following the below steps.

The first error you’ll see if you experience this problem is probably this:

Fatal error: Method Varien_Object::__tostring() cannot take arguments in /lib/Varien/Object.php

Let’s take care of it by editing the file lib/Varien/Object.php and look around line 477 for this:

/**
 * Convert object attributes to string
 *
 * @param  array  $arrAttributes array of required attributes
 * @param  string $valueSeparator
 * @return string
 */
public function __toString(array $arrAttributes = array(), $valueSeparator=',')
{
    $arrData = $this->toArray($arrAttributes);
    return implode($valueSeparator, $arrData);
}

Replace the above code (more specifically, line 484) with the following:

/**
 * Convert object attributes to string
 *
 * @return string
 */
public function __invoke(array $arrAttributes = array(), $valueSeparator=',')
{
    $arrData = $this->toArray($arrAttributes);
    return implode($valueSeparator, $arrData);
}

The additional errors you’ll run into have to do with usage of deprecated functions. Some of the Magento developers like to use the PHP function split() which has been deprecated. Luckily, explode() is a functional replacement that you can swap in. You can search the source code and replace all the occurrences or just alter the error reporting declarations so you don’t trigger the warnings.

Open up the index.php file and around line 35 you’ll find:

error_reporting(E_ALL | E_STRICT);

Change the line to exclude deprecated errors:

error_reporting((E_ALL | E_STRICT) & !E_DEPRECATED)

Good luck!