How to upgrade php on server running Plesk Virtuozzo?

How on earth does plesk actually work? I have a VPS which is on centos 5.2 and has php 5.1.6. I have updated plesk to version 9.52 and it claimed to do some form of php update but it hasn't as far as i can see. How can i update to php 5.2 (centos 5.4) without breaking plesk Virtuozzo?!

Pl开发者_如何转开发esk seems to be some kind of crazy black magic that i just don't understand.

Plesk uses whatever version of PHP is currently installed on the server.

You can update PHP to version 5.2 or higher from the IUS repository, but because Plesk looks in the RPM database specifically for the package "php" and not "php52" it will show that PHP is not installed, and PHP will break. I've gotten around this by compiling a dummy php package, with nothing in it, just called "php" so that Plesk won't disable PHP functionality, but that's not the best way to go.