I received an email from my webhost the other day that said, HostGator is excited to announce that we will be upgrading our servers to PHP 8.2.” They were going to start rolling it out on or about the 20th of February, but I figured why not go ahead and do it myself in my cPanel. Several clicks later my website was running the new version instead of PHP 7.3.
The only trouble was, WordPress was not happy with the change. Life of Brian was just displaying an error page. As usual, I made the leap of upgrading PHP, just like I do with every WordPress update, without backing up the database or deactivating any plugins. This time it bit me in the ass.
Step one was back into cPanel to rename my plugin directory to /plugin.old see if plain old WordPress would come up. And, phew, it did. So, the database wasn’t the problem. One of the plugins must not be compatible with the new PHP. Next step was to create a new /plugin directory and add my 25 plugins back one by one and wait for the crash. It didn’t take long.
The very first one I tried caused the blog to disappear and an error page to show. And unfortunately it was one of my favorites and alphabetically first, A Year Before.If you clicked that last link and can’t read German, let me ‘splain it to you. On the date you are looking at the blog, this widget would show a couple links that are the title of a post I created on that same particular date in the past.
The only other plugin that was problematic was one that allowed me to put widgets in columns on the sidebar. It didn’t crash the site, but it did screw up the nice way I had the ‘best of’ and ‘rest of’ displayed in the sidebar. I did make a work around, but it isn’t nearly as elegant looking as before.