I broke my blog. :-(

[scoop]

Howdy folks,

I recently tried updating my Sonic-hosted Wordpress blog from version 3.something to version 5.something, and now I can't re-access my Dashboard or even bring up the login page at all -- just the "HTTP ERROR 500" error message below. (I did backup/export all my content before the "update.") When I tried accessing the blog using my phone, a different message directed me to contact Sonic Support, who then directed me to this forum. Is any of this something you could help me with?

Thanks in advance, and be well,

Neal

bad blog - metaphorager.net.jpg (10.84 KiB) Viewed 3519 times

[joemuller]

Hi Neal,

I think I've got your blog back up and going - a quick review of what I found:
- the newer (5.x) versions of Wordpress don't play nice with PHP4, so I had to make a couple changes to your .htaccess file to get at least PHP 5.6 enabled for the site
- the database permissions for the blog were set up with an older MySQL permission that no longer worked on newer versions of PHP
- the site 'error-log' file had maxed-out at 2GB, with the last entries being over a year ago, so I cleared the contents out so I could actually see errors again
- one of the plugins ('pretty-link') was using a syntax ('??') that wasn't valid until PHP 7 or later (so immediate error on loading any page)
- because of the above newer plugin, I bumped up the site to PHP 7 so it would render
- the 'statpress' Wordpress plugin has a function (eregi()) that is no longer supported in PHP7, so I moved it to the 'plugins-disabled' folder so the page would load again

I think that should get you to a working site again - lots of the above issues are just caused by very old plugins or the need for a newer PHP. (The latest couple of versions of Wordpress finally started requiring PHP7, so I would recommend making sure all your plugins are up to date or potentially find replacements if they are no longer supported.

-- Joe M

[scoop]

Oh man! Everything seems solid right now; thank you THANK YOU thank you -- and tell Dane and Scott I said you should get a raise. Will everything be okay if I choose to update to WP 6.7.1, or will I have to bug you all again?

Be well,

Neal

[joemuller]

Hi Neal,

Yes, since you have PHP 7.4 enabled for the site now, it should be safe to upgrade to Wordpress 6.7.x. I recommend keeping the Wordpress Troubleshooting Guide handy in case you run into any sort of theme or plugin problems.

-- Joe M

[scoop]

EEEeeexcellent. Thank you again!

[scoop]

Hey Joe,

Once again I must ask if this is up your particular alley: I tried implementing my Wordpress Stats plugin last night, but all I got was the following error-message concerning my SSL certificate:

User Agent: "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
Page URL: "http://metaphorager.net/test/wp-admin/a ... &width=958"
API URL: "https://dashboard.wordpress.com/wp-admi ... 75&j=1:6.5"
http_request_failed: "cURL error 60: SSL certificate problem: unable to get local issuer certificate"


Can you make sense of this, and is it, I hope, fixable? Some of the other (prospective but yet uninstalled) plugins also mentioned something about the SSL certificate being wonky, so I assume it's a big deal. (I'm a patient man, so please -- take your time.)

Be well,

Neal

[scoop]

Also, this just in after I tried connecting to my Wordpress.com Jetpack stats:

Outbound HTTPS not working
Your site could not connect to WordPress.com via HTTPS. This could be due to any number of reasons, including faulty SSL certificates, misconfigured or missing SSL libraries, or network issues.

Jetpack will re-test for HTTPS support once a day, but you can click here to try again immediately: Try again WordPress reports no SSL support

???