Upgrading to WordPress 6.1

Filed under Blogging, WordPress

This site’s been chugging along for years now. I’ve been super happy with my hosting company, NameCheap, and everything has just worked.

Until, of course, it didn’t.

I used to use Microsoft’s LiveWriter way back when, but then, they quit updating it and it quit connecting to my blog so… I just used the WordPress editor and continued on.

I finally had minute to take a look and realized that I hadn’t updated WordPress is quite some time.

So, back up the site, then update… oops, no, I’m using an ancient version of PHP.

So, update PHP to 8.1

Update WP to 6.1

Bam!

Critical error loading WordPress

Oh Joy

So I start all the typical stuff. I’m no WordPress expert, by any stretch.

Update all the plugins.

Nope

Disable all the plugins.

Nope

Clear caches. Reset Themes.

Nope, and Nope.

This might turn into a long night.

So I punt.

The guys (and gals) in NameCheap support have pulled me out of a wringer before, so I figured I might give em a shout. The worst they could do is tell me “that’s your programming problem”. Smile

Joy

So I search the Knowledge Base right quick, come up empty, and finally decide to file a support ticket.

Within an hour, I get a message back that they’d had a look at my WordPress log and the issue appeared to be with my theme at line x.

No freakin’ way!

Open the theme INDEX.PHP up and, sure enough, turns out the old WordPress was more forgiving with PHP files that used <? … ?> instead of the newer style <?PHP … ?>

Literally 2 lines of code changed and presto. Entire site back and running!

And not only that, the latest OpenLiveWriter (the open sourced version of my old friend), recognized it and loaded up perfectly. I’m even writing up this entry using it!

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