Hi @AlexHall,
If you’re still getting the message The "exec" PHP function has been disabled on your server, then I don’t think your sysadmin has correctly enabled it. You can see the line of code that generates this message:
if (in_array('exec', explode(',', ini_get('disable_functions'))))
throw new Exception('The "exec" PHP function has been disabled on your server. Contact your system adminstrator to enable it.');
You can try this line in your own PHP test script to confirm outside of the OJS environment. (If the site uses a persistent PHP process pool, e.g. FPM, FastCGI or mod_php, then the sysadmin may have forgotten to restart that to cause the settings change to take effect.)
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team