Well, after many hours of fiddling with plugins, deactivating them, deleting them, etc. and after chmod-ing my various directories through ssh (thank you, fabulous husband and unix king) to 777 (I really hate that, by the way), and then chmod-ing them back again (phew!), and then resetting the WordPress theme back to the default Kubrick, I was about to give up and just do a complete re-install of WordPress 2.8.4.
What was bothering me? It started with the dashboard RSS feeds hanging on “loading …” and then never loading. I wasn’t horribly bothered by that, since I don’t look at those RSS feeds alot. But then, I wanted to automatically update a plugin that had a new version. That upgrade hung on “downloading” the zip, but the zip file in the plugin folder on the server was always 0 KB. Likewise for an automatic re-install of WordPress. It would just hang. I finally decided that I’d better better get to the bottom of these weird problems and see what was really happening. By that I mean, I started Googling all kinds of strange words and phrases.
Then, luckily, something in my dashboard really broke. Yes, luckily. When I tried to configure one of the RSS feeds that wouldn’t come down — just change it to show a couple of posts instead of five — I got the almighty 500 error – Internal server error from my ISP, 1and1. Hallelujah! I thought maybe I was running out of memory and maybe needed to allocate something more for mySQL (oh, this whole process started with me backing up the mySQL database through phpAdmin, just like WordPress recommends). So, I started Googling the 500 error on 1and1 along with WordPress and I ran into a great thread at drupal.org. It recommended editing the .htaccess file by the adding the following:
AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
Apparently, Apache will use PHP4, unless you ask it to use PHP5. Wordpress, of course, wants PHP5. So, I made the change to the .htaccess file and, all of a sudden, after many hours of chasing down everything that wasn’t wrong with the site, everything started working again.
Wow.
Now it’s time to — you guessed it — put all the plug-ins and widgets back in place, while compulsively checking the dashboard and the front of the site, diddle Atahualpa yet again, re-create some customized widgets, and on and on. And compulsively check the dashboard and the front of the site.
Subscribe: