‘An unexpected error occurred. Something may be wrong with www.ads-software.com…’

This usually means you have an mis-configured or out of date set of openSSL libraries on your server.

Please install the health check plugin and report back its findings: https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/health-check/

PHP Version	                   –5.3.29-pl0-gentoo - For performance and 
                                   security reasons, we strongly recommend 
                                   running PHP version 7.0 or higher.
MySQL Server version	           ✓5.6.37-82.2-56-log
JSON Extension	                   ✓Your PHP install supports JSON.
MySQL utf8mb4 support	           ✓Your MySQL version supports utf8mb4
                                   –WordPress' utf8mb4 support requires MySQL 
                                   client library (mysqlnd) version 5.0.9 or 
                                   newer.
Communication with www.ads-software.com   ✓www.ads-software.com is reachable from your server.
HTTPS status	                   –You are not using HTTPS to access this 
                                   website.
Secure communication	           ✓Your WordPress install can communicate 
                                   securely with other services.
Scheduled events	           ✓No scheduled events have been missed.
Background updates	           ✓No version control systems were detected.
                                   ✓Your installation of WordPress doesn't 
                                   require FTP credentials to perform updates.
                                   ✓All of your WordPress files are writable.
Loopback request	           ✓The loopback request to your site completed 
                                   successfully.

I tried to ‘prettify’ the output above as much as I could. ??

FYI, my host is Network Solutions, and I’m using the shared hosting package (so I don’t have access to Apache settings and logs, for example).

One red flag: PHP 5.3. Upgrade to 5.6 or 7. That should be doable from the hosting control panel. See if that fixes the other issue.

I upgraded to 7 and unfortunately I’m getting the same error. ??

This may be related, but I’m trying to go into Themes -> Appearance and add a header image to my theme, and when it loads the library for me to pick the image, I get the dreaded spinning cursor and it never loads the image library. I’ve kept this page up for hours, with the spinning cursor just doing its thing. The same thing happens when I try to add images to a slideshow plugin. Is my installation seriously borked?

Using the health-check plugin, disable all plugins and themes and see if things improve. If so, use it to turn things back on one at a time until something breaks.

OK…here is what I have determined. The problem stems from my use of a child theme. I am doing so because I want to create a custom header widget area and don’t want my custom changes to be overwritten if the theme gets updated. I complied with the documentation on WP.org to create the child theme, so I don’t know what I’ve been doing wrong.

That’s a weird thing to happen from a coding error!

So what files did you copy over to the child? I would imagine header.php and you’d create a functions.php to add the widget area. Any others?

I’m willing to take a look; put the files on gist.github.com and put links here.

The first tutorial specified that I should add style.css and functions.php…

The other tutorial I used said to add a custom header function to functions.php…

The gist is here:

https://gist.github.com/sydbarrett74/928eb2104370c230a64af9e3a1144686

BTW, thank you so much for your assistance. ??

I see nothing in those two files that should cause trouble. I’m going to ask about this in the back room.

BUT — try removing the?> from the last line of functions.php. That might be causing issues.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 1 month ago by Steven Stern (sterndata).

Definitely, remove the ?> from the last line of functions.php. End the file with the semicolon at line 29.

Also, remove the comments and blank lines from lines 9-16

Your suggestions to remove the comments—I instead put those in an accompanying .txt file—worked.

My reasoning for putting a ?> at the end of the child theme’s functions.php was to match the opening <?php (I guess I was wrong).