bmitchdotorg

Hello,

I’d like to inform you guys I went through this same exact thing WHILE I was developing my WordPress blog. I was making some posts and went to disable a plugin when I noticed I got a “500 Internal Server Error.” I figured I must of messed with something so I uploaded my backups and the same exact thing was going on. I then managed to turn the plugin back on and I could access plugins.php again. I then tried to manually install a plugin and boom, “500 Internal Server Error” happened again, but once I removed the plugin folder from wp-content/plugins I could see the page again.

This was very weird and didn’t make sense, but it seemed whenever I messed with any plugin the plugins.php (adding folders, installing plugins anything new or different added) page would break. So then I tried to go to the plugin-install area where there was no search results or popular tags and my dashboard wouldn’t pick up any feeds, couldn’t upload images and akismet stopped working. Something was very wrong…

I then logged into one of my other sites wp-admin logged in and the same thing was going on which led me to conclude there was no way in hell I did something (both sites effected and are on the same server), it HAD to be my host. After searching through PHP configurations and searching and searching, I happened to click on our CPANEL Fantastico link and found an abundant of these errors…

Warning: shell_exec() has been disabled for security reasons in /tmp/cpanel_phpengine.1257856467.15804cIK2LRagZL on line 1473

Seemed shell_exec was disabled from my hosts side accidentally, after spending about 3 hours thinking I messed up I sent my host a ticket letting them know of the error, they sent me an e-mail back saying they had fixed it and low and behold everything worked again.

So to my knowledge it’s happening because either A.) Your host only allows 32MB of memory (was the first issue which I requested for an increase and they happily did it for me) or B.) Your host has disabled something (like the shell_exec error I mentioned, if you have cpanel click on fantastico and see if you have that error).

If you have access to another installation of WordPress on the server then log in and check to see if it’s the same case (search, feeds and etc not working). Also check to see if there are any plugins at all installed and active, uncheck those and if it’s still messed up then it’s your hosts side.

Also check your “WP-Settings.php” and make sure your memory limit is not set to 32MB (code is right below for example, change the 32M part to your actual memory amount). Even if your host has increased your memory if WordPress is still set to 32MB it will not go passed it (found out the hard way).

if ( !defined('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT') )
	define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '32M');

Sorry about the long post, but I had been trying to research this problem for a long time and couldn’t find anything and finally found something out and figured I’d inform everyone. Hope this helps because it was a pain for me to figure out.

-Brandon
https://www.ichabodmedia.com