Warning after PHP upgrade "Deprecated: Methods with the same name as their class..."

Issue

After upgrading PHP from 5.4 to 7.0 following warning is displayed: 

Deprecated: Methods with the same name as their class will not be constructors in a future version of PHP; Pages has a deprecated constructor in /home4/webmaster/public_html/website/classes/pages.class.php on line 16

Resolution

The warning can be hidden by setting display_errors to Off in php.ini. Obviously this just hides the issue so a proper fix here is to fix the class in question.

Open the file mentioned in the warring message and find the constructor method. It should look something like this:

 
function Pages($id) {
...
}
 

Kunena forum breaks after update

Issue

Joomla's Kunena forum breaks after attempting upgrading to version 5.0.6 (using Joomla auto-updater). Upgrade fails, in the front-end the forum displays "Offline" message. Trying to get into Kunena back-end admin panel triggers an attempt to resume the upgrade which immediately fails again...

Trying to install Kunena manually (uploading pkg_kunena_v5.0.5 package via Joomla's installer) seems to succeed at first, but forum is still broken. Trying to remove the forum and then re-install uploading the same package also seems to succeed, but this breaks Kunena completely. Any attempt to get into Kunena front-end or back-end throws HTTP 500 error page...

Hostgator shared hosting - emails sent via PHP mail not delivered

Emails sent using PHP mail() function are not reaching recipients. Sender's domain is a domain that has a website hosted on the same Hostgator server (which I believe is a requirement).

After a bit of troubleshooting I found that the issue occurs if recipient's domain has a website hosted on the same Hostgator server as well (but email on a different system).

Simple PEAR PHP script to send emails using AuthSMTP

 
require_once "Mail.php";
function send_mail_pear (){
 $mail_to = 'This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.';
 $mail_subject = 'Enquiry From Website';
 $mail_from = 'My Website <webmaster@domain>'; // make sure email is authorised in your AuthSMTP account
$mail_body = 'Email body HTML';
 
$headers = array(
 'From' => $mail_from,
 'To' => $mail_to,
 'Subject' => $mail_subject,
 'Content-type' => 'text/html; charset=utf-8');
 
$smtp = Mail::factory('smtp', array(
 'host' => 'ssl://mail.authsmtp.com',
 'port' => '465',
 'auth' => true,
 'debug' => false,
 'username' => 'accountId', // Your AuthSMTP account username
 'password' => 'Password' // Your AuthSMTP account password
 ));
 
$mail = $smtp->send($mail_to, $headers, $mail_body);
 if (PEAR::isError($mail)) { //Email sending failed (to troubleshoot set 'debug' => true)
 return (false);
 } 
 else{ // Email was sent successfully
 return (true);
 }
}