Default WP installation stops working with PHP 7.3

  • Resolved celejar0

    (@celejar0)


    6 years, 9 months ago

    Hi,

    I recently starting playing with more recent PHP versions (than my host’s default 5.6), after getting the scary “Warning” on my WordPress dashboard. After much gnashing of teeth, I have found that everything works up to version 7.2, but even a bog standard configuration (no active plugins, 2019 theme, no customizations that I can recall) fails with 7.3 with “The site is experiencing technical difficulties. Please check your site admin email inbox for instructions.” I’m not getting any email. I’m running WP 5.2.2. Any ideas?

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  • Moderator t-p

    (@t-p)

    6 years, 9 months ago

    – WordPress 5.2 introduced new protection from sites crashing due to bad code (also known as a White Screen of Death, or WSOD for short).
    – If your site crashes, the technical difficulties message is shown, and an email is sent to the site admin with a way to log in and deactivate the plugin or theme causing problems, once that is done the site should start working again as expected.
    – If you didn’t get the email, you can look for an error log on your server to see what the problem is. If you can’t find one, use DEBUG mode to log an error so you can fix it. https://codex.ww.wp.xz.cn/Editing_wp-config.php#Debug

    Thread Starter celejar0

    (@celejar0)

    6 years, 9 months ago

    Thanks! I set DEBUG mode, and found this (obfuscated) error:

    Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function mysql_connect() in /home/xxxxxxxx/public_html/wp-includes/wp-db.php:1643 Stack trace: #0 /home/xxxxxxxx/public_html/wp-includes/wp-db.php(639): wpdb->db_connect() #1 /home/xxxxxxxx/public_html/wp-includes/load.php(427): wpdb->__construct('xxxxxxxx_wp', 'yyyyyyyy', 'xxxxxxxx_wp', 'localhost') #2 /home/xxxxxxxx/public_html/wp-settings.php(120): require_wp_db() #3 /home/xxxxxxxx/public_html/wp-config.php(103): require_once('/home/xxxxxxxx/...') #4 /home/xxxxxxxx/public_html/wp-load.php(37): require_once('/home/xxxxxxxx/...') #5 /home/xxxxxxxx/public_html/wp-admin/admin.php(34): require_once('/home/xxxxxxxx/...') #6 /home/xxxxxxxx/public_html/wp-admin/index.php(10): require_once('/home/xxxxxxxx/...') #7 {main} thrown in /home/xxxxxxxx/public_html/wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 1643

    Based on various posts I found when digging online, I enabled (in cPanel’s “PHP Selector” section) the previously disabled PHP extensions ‘nd_mysqli’ and ‘nd_pdo_mysql’, and the problem went away. I suppose that WordPress ought to document this somewhere.

    Thanks!

    • This reply was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by celejar0. Reason: typo
    Moderator t-p

    (@t-p)

    6 years, 9 months ago

    Glad its sorted 🙂

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