bluecrabfan

Yes – I did confirm. It says version 7.0 for php.

7.0 was still listed as “beta” at my hosting company (BlueHost), so I didn’t realize it was necessary. Anyway, I updated it to 7 and it’s still throwing the error… It’s not possible that there’s something else askew?

Thank you for your quick reply. I just updated it to 5.6 and says it was successful. I refreshed the page and tried to activate the plugin again. It still says Plugin could not be activated with the same error message.

Do you think it needs some time to take effect? Or could there be another issue here?

This turned out to be the fault of the Share Buttons plugin by AddThis. I loaded a clean copy of WP and then isolated all my plugins. It worked just fine after I deleted this plugin. I have notified them of the issue – beware.