Sonic.net

tikvah wrote:When will this be automatic? I have I think 6 sites running Wordpress at Sonic.net and there is no way in hell I'm going to figure out how to get to the shell (can't telnet anymore and haven't done that for years anyway) and upgrade .htaccess files for every single site. AND repeat the process every few months when there's a new PHP out.

I've updated all 5 of your Wordpress sites to fix the database issue [1] and put them on PHP 5.6. Unless something major changes in Wordpress or PHP's behavior, you shouldn't have to touch the database again. You may need to login to Wordpress Admin page for each site if it has not been updated in a while or you got a warning last time.

-- Joe

[1] For those who care about the technical details of why old passwords don't work in PHP 5.6 and later, see here. Sonic's Wordpress One-Click Installer, used to use the old password format when setting up the database, so for sites that have been around a long time, they might suffer similar database connection issues when trying to use PHP 5.6.

joemuller wrote:I've updated all 5 of your Wordpress sites to fix the database issue [1] and put them on PHP 5.6. Unless something major changes in Wordpress or PHP's behavior, you shouldn't have to touch the database again. You may need to login to Wordpress Admin page for each site if it has not been updated in a while or you got a warning last time.

I noticed. Thank you for taking care of it. I hope everyone else needing this upgrade will get the same service. This is a security risk for Sonic and I'm sure you want us all to have up-to-date Wordpress installations.

I hope everyone else needing this upgrade will get the same service. This is a security risk

I hope to see a notice/email/banner/message or something telling us when the upgrade has happened.

Though I note the lack of such notice would serve as an invitation to crackers that Sonic was vulnerable until upgraded. Maybe this is security through obscurity?

No offense meant, just a bit concerned here.

From the latest WP update:

PHP 7.4 Compatibility
WordPress 5.3 aims to fully support PHP 7.4. This release contains multiple changes to remove deprecated functionality and ensure compatibility. WordPress continues to encourage all users to run the latest and greatest versions of PHP.