Francesco

Hi @waebi ,

Thank you for your input and advises. I ended up setting up staging environments and running possible different scenarios, and in the end the upgrade went smoothly – Much easier than I thought.

For the benefit of anyone else in a similar situation, I basically:

• Did a full backup.
• Set up a staging environment for the old set up, to compare visual differences once the upgrade was finished.
• Started with a fresh, virgin child theme (empty style.css and functions.php).
• Run the upgrade.
• Went through the WP Customizer options one by one, and in many cases had to deactivate / reactivate any option to see changes being implemented (logos, previous colour schemes, etc)
• Recreated widgets like “AxlTabs” (now Hueman Tabs), etc.
• Added only the still relevant bits of CSS customisation to my child style.css.
• Added more customisation to functions.php.
• Removed plugins that provide functionalities now embedded in the theme, such as lazy loading or minification.

I think that’s pretty much the checklist I run through.
Good luck everyone, and thank you Press Customizr for keeping this wonderful theme so well oiled and for making it so good.

I noticed the same thing as reported by OP and also in the Loom video posted above..

PS I think this is due to the fact that I minify JS files via W3TC

I use both the “Merge + Minify + Refresh” and the “Cookie Notice” plugins on a website, and I don’t have this error in the console.

@spabrice, what kind of Minify settings do you have in place?

I have JS minification disabled (can’t remember why I had to set it like that). HTTP/2 ticked, as well as the Gzip setting.

Perhaps try that and see if the error goes away? Hope it helps.

Glad it helped!

I encountered the error when I upgraded to PHP 7 while having the W3 Total Cache “Database cache” enabled.

Maybe you’ve played around with W3TC today?

See for reference: https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/database-cache-causing-503-errors-when-upgrading-to-php-7/

For what is worth, I encountered the same error and the issue was solved by enabling the nd_mysqli extension in the PHP 7 configuration, and disabling the mysqli one.

Thank you.

On my server, the mysqli extension was enabled.

I ticked it off and selected nd_mysqli instead, and the problem is solved.

Thanks again for all your help!

Thanks for the suggestion, @vmarko.

Would define(‘WP_USE_EXT_MYSQL’, true); force WP to use MySQL by default, rather than MySQLi?

“Use MySQLi when available by default” was introduced in 4.9.2 and I feel that forcing to use MySQL is like backtracking – Are there any plans for the DB cache to work using MySQLi too?

The website is on a shared server, so only Disk caching is available unfortunately.

Do you have any other suggestions?

Nevermind… It works now. Must have been a caching issue!

Out of interest, what’s the different between the old code posted on the website:

function related_posts_exclude_terms_widget( $args ) {
    $args['exclude_posts'] = array( 1, 2 );
    return $args;
}

And the new one?

function related_posts_exclude_terms_widget( $args ) {
$args['exclude_terms'] = array( 1, 2 );
$args = related_posts_exclude_terms_strict( $args );
return $args;
	
}

Hi @vmarko and @bogdanstratulat

I can confirm that disabling DB caching and upgrading to PHP 7.2 works just fine.

It’s when I re-enable DB caching that the 503 errors start.

Thanks for your help.

Hi, thank you for your reply. Yes, the plugin is updated to the latest version.

Thanks for your reply, Jerry.

I’ll have a think and see if moving the cookie notice to the top makes sense.

Totally agree with you that I’d rather have someone calling, than acknowledging the cookie message ??

On the other hand, I don’t want to clutter the website with notices and buttons on the top and on the bottom.

I guess it’s a fine line…

Another option I’m experimenting is to automatically dismiss the cookie bar after a certain amount of vertical scroll… bye bye.

I’ll work something out.

Thanks again for the quick reply. Love the plugin, been using it for years. Signed up for the premium preview too ??

I like and second this idea!

FWIW, I’ve just re-uploaded a file named t&o.zip.
There is the “file” icon next to the t&o.zip line in the Excludes list, but Stop Exclusing does not work.

I think the & in the filename is messing with whatever scripts is running the stop exclusion command.