Product List back up, for now.

After trying several new PHP plugins I still didn’t have any luck in getting the Product List and the Recent Releases list working. I had tracked things down to the point that it would hang up with it hit the $connection = mysql_connect($host,$user,$password) or die ("couldn't connect to server"); portion of the script.
Eventually I went into the Dashboard for my website that my host provides and saw that my site was set to use PHP 7.0. It gave me the choice to use PHP 5.6 instead and once I switched to that, things started working again, even with the new plugin.
I’ll have to do some research on whether it is the plugins (I tried several) that can’t handle PHP 7.0 or if it is my underlying code that needs updating for PHP 7.0