(Disclaimer: I admit upfront that I’m a complete luddite, but I am very good at reading & following instructions!)

I’ve just spent most of the day working with my web host (Netfirms) trying to upgrade my wordpress site from PHP 7.3 to 7.4. My site will unfailingly crash whenever I move to 7.4 . I deactivated and then deleted all my plugins AND switched my theme after the rep told me these were probably the reasons for the crash.

Finally, after several hours, the rep indicated that “wp_version=6.4.2” is not compatible to PHP 7.4. Surely this cannot be true?! Is there anything else that could be causing this? I understand how important it is to keep up with the latest versions.

In the meantime, I’m afraid my site will be hammered with spam and hackers because I’ve no plug-ins to help manage security.

Some other details:

• I’ve maintained and updated my site on this platform for about 8 years; although lately I’ve neglected updates and missed the Nov 2023 deadline for PHP 7.3.
• I was unable to completely delete two plugins: W3 Total Cache and Participants Database. For unknown reasons, these will not delete.
• My web host and plan currently only offers an upgrade to PHP 7.4. (I was s)urprised to see others here reporting on upgrades to 8.0 or higher!
• If it’s significant, the web host is running MySQL version 5.6.32 – although I’ve read on this support forum it should be 5.7. Is this correct??

If someone could help shed some light on this mystery for me (the English major who thinks SQL is shorthand for “squirrel”), I’d be so very grateful. Many thanks,

Cranky

While trying to fix a relatively minor Google Map API problem, I have gone down a rabbit hole that has taken my site offline, including wp_admin. This may be related to PHP compatibility. Please help.

Roughly what happened was that:

• I removed an older version of a theme
• Added the new version
• Discovered that it depended on plugins that were incompatible with the version of WP I was using (minimum 5.6 I think?)
• Discovered that the site was completely non-functional now
• Tried to update WP
• Discovered that I needed to update PHP
• Updated to the latest version of PHP on my host server (7.3)
• Discovered that this made wp_admin non-functional
• Called hosting support. And they replaced PHP 7.3 with an older version (5.2) although I’m not 100% certain that that was the one I had been on. The advised me that it may take 1-2 hours to percolate through. But it has been 3 1/2 and the entire site is still dead.

I exported my site before I did this. I can only pray that it can be restored.
I’m wondering if my site was originally on PHP 5.4 rather than 5.2. I could ask the host provider to change it (it’s too old to be an option on the dashboard). And I’ve been told that I can access files and settings using an FTP client. Other than that I’m stuck.

Thanks in advance.

Apache 2.2
PHP 5.2.11
MySQL 5.0.88

These are being run on Windows XP Pro SP3.

I recently updated one of the installs to 3.7 and after doing so, if I try to update any themes or plugins I get an error that says something like this: The package could not be installed. PCLZIP_ERR_BAD_FORMAT (-10) : Unable to find End of Central Dir Record signature.

For now I am just trying to get authoritative advice on whether the versions of the components I am running will work with 3.7 and 3.8.

I tried updating another install to 3.8 which went fine, but when I tried to update the twentythirteen theme I got the same error message as above. NOTE: I just tried it again and the theme updated successfully.

My main question is: What version of PHP is required for 3.7 and 3.8? Some people have said that 5.3 is required and some have said 5.2.5.

I am nervous about updating my other installs until I find out what the latest version of PHP that they will work with.

Thanks

Has anyone come up with a script (perl, sh, anything) that will locate all installations of WordPress, report the sitename and tell what version is installed? I thought there could be something like this out there already and haven’t begun anything yet.

It would be nice to have something to keep track of what versions are on the machines so updates can be done more easily.

Thanks,
Beth