Multiple Issue in MySQL 5 Strict

I have been hired as an in house developer for a company and they have a host of WordPress sites that are hosted in house. I have been trying to clean them up and make changes but the first issue was, I got errors that would not allow the WordPress to be updated. It was version 3.1 or something. I ended up manually doing it via FTP and finally got it to work.

Additionally, I am unable to delete certain plugins, made code changes to plugins or the theme in editor and a plugin like Cart66 cannot write to the database to create a table. I am used to installing on a host’s server rather than an in house self hosted one and I would think it would be similar but right now, it seems to be different. Any changes I make on my VPS to the test site work fine but do not work on the production site.

If I want to make code changes, I can only do it via FTP and I can’t write much to the database at all so some plugins are failing. I can’t uninstall some plugins from the dashboard. The files have to be deleted via FTP to force an uninstall but the database info is still there.

I’m thinking strict mode has something to do with it but I am other wise stumped on what the issue could be at this point. Does anyone have any ideas?