From the phpinfo() output it looks like your specific configuration has glob() listed in the php.ini disable_functions (so, it’s being detected as not existing-- that’s really not a setup which had been considered when the code was written).
That being said, I’ve been inactive as far as openFIRST stuff goes for quite a while (and haven’t contributed to the main codebase for about 3 years, now), so, I don’t know of a way to work around that problem if you can’t remove glob() from the disable_functions list. Hopefully Jamie will reply since he has a much better idea of things than I do.
We use glob() to detect plugins. The alternative is not something I want to maintain. (opendir(), etc.)
safe_mode is something that breaks a lot of software, unfortunately. It isn’t very subtle or delicate in terms of the way it secures PHP–disable everything potentially dangerous.
As for coding around it, I removed the compatibility version (Because we stopped supporting PHP3).
That is not to say that it couldn’t be added back–it’s just something we hadn’t considered.
You don’t need to modify anything. I just thought I would test it to see how it worked and what it looked like. If I wanted anything I could program my own PHP script.