Granting php sudo acsess

I am trying to grant php sudo access (for automated share mounting). I was sucess full at granting php sudo access on one of my systems by adding daemond to the list of sudo's via

su --login -c 'visudo'

so now it contains the daemond like:

daemon  ALL=(ALL)  NOPASSWD: ALL

but when I try to run a simple php script:

<?php
echo "\nfirst: ";
echo shell_exec("whoami");
echo "\nsecond: ";
echo shell_exec("sudo ls");
?>

I get the results:

first: daemon
second:

That is any time I us shell_exec with sudo in the command nothing is returned or excited. How can I grant php sudo access.