In the past, I've run php and allowed it within user subdirectories, thus content in public_html can use .php files.

All was going well until I upgraded the system, then all kinds of things broke relating to home pages.

Turns out there's a new policy with PHP that disables PHP by default in user home directories. This is actually a really good idea for security reasons.

However, if a system doesn't have untrusted users, it can be okay to re-enable.

This requires going into the /etc/apache2/mods-available/php*.conf file that contains the text public_html, and commenting out the IfModule statements.

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#<IfModule mod_userdir.c>
#    <Directory /home/*/public_html>
#        php_admin_flag engine Off
#    </Directory>
#</IfModule>

Do NOT set the content within them to On, as it may be so tempting to do; for doing so will prevent .htaccess from being able to override the setting.