Hi kyberfabrickken, Kalon, TomB & Vali
Your replies were spot-on!
kyberfabrickken, I have followed the links through the PHP manual given and written what I guess is belt & braces by adding
<?php
echo ini_get(‘display_errors’);
?>
to the top of my product_test file (+ the closing tag (this must have been inadvertantly deleted when I was commenting-out & and removing slashes in a bid to find out what was wrong)
I also edited the line in my ini file “display_errors = “stderr””. “display_errors = On” & “error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE” were on by default.
The browser showed a blank screen until I removed the slashes on the echo statement returning the 500 error.
Kalon, I copied and pasted your “getProductType()” codeline to my file and it now works as expected.
Vali, I have PHP 5.3 downloaded but the installation file still talks about a file “php5ts.dll” which I cannot find in the unzip PHP folder, a file “php5.dll” was found but whether it can be treated as an alternative I dont know!
Many thanks to all who answered my post.