Trouble Loading Plugins.php In WordPress 2.7 and up

Do you have a choice to run php 5.x.x ?
Would work better for sure.

Thanks for the reply. Regarding php 5, I was wondering whether or not that would be a plus. I’ve found conflicting reports on what version of php is best with WordPress 2.7 and it seemed like most people were saying php 4.

So you think if I got my server people to upgrade to php 5, that would help? The odd thing is, the server where WP works is running an earlier version of php 4 than the one where WP breaks. Very mysterious.

Here’s another question that’s been bothering me — what does it mean if there’s a number (in a red circle) next to the Plugins link in the admin sidebar menu? On the site I am working on, there is a numeral 1 next to Plugins in the sidebar nav. Other WordPress sites don’t have any numbers showing next to Plugins. Just curious since the number doesn’t seem to correlate to anything that I can see. Any ideas?

Interestingly, I noticed that I got the same error (Server timed out) on a page on a completely different site (not even a wordpress site) that tries to load an image from the url rather than the path. I wonder what the plugins.php page is trying to do that the server doesn’t like?

Upgrading to PHP 5 is tempting but I have over 40 sites running on that server and I don’t want to spend the next few weeks cleaning up all the minor glitches that will likely occur if I do that. You kind of want to be ready for a major upgrade.

So I continue to ponder my dilemma and wonder why it is that when WordPress users encounter the “white screen of death”, those issues never seem to be resolved (or at least, the resolutions are not posted online anywhere). They just fade away. One assumes the people having the white page problems either switch servers, blogging platforms or solve the problem another way, without telling the online community how they did it. ??

Exact same problem with my wordpress ?? Don’t know what to do…

After today, I think I’ve tried everything. I’ve looked at stray line breaks and memory limit and bad paths and permissions, and if anything, it’s slightly more broken (before, I was able to get plugins.php to load with Akismet and Hello.php in the folder — not anymore).

My solution, which I don’t like, is to migrate the site from the PHP 4.4.9 server to the PHP 4.4.8 server, which seems backward but that’s what works. I would love to know what’s different between the two but looking at phpinfo(), I see nothing. When I have the money, I’ll get a server running PHP 5 and we’ll see if it works. But not this week.

The troublesome thing for me is not knowing just what broke it. Without knowing that, I feel more reluctant now to recommend WordPress to clients, even though I love it when it works. But I’ve had too many white screens of death problems to want to recommend it except to lone bloggers and very small non-profits — and then, only with full warning about what it entails.

Anyway, it’s been entertaining reading people’s variously solved and unsolved tales of woe. I do think the white screen of death (WSD) is a major flaw and should be resolved somehow — or a list of more precise server requirements published (which if it exists, I couldn’t find). What does WordPress want! ??

PS I figured out what the number next to Plugins in the sidebar means — it was an un-updated plugin. That said, removing the plugin didn’t solve the problem. I still had to remove all the plugins….

It’s an out of memory problem. PHP5 has a memory limit. Up the memory limit by adding the below line to the very top of your site’s root .htaccess file to resolve this problem.

php_value memory_limit 1000M