Sometimes figuring out WordPress errors is a fun, if sometimes frustrating, puzzle. A client reported her site was down. It had a 500 error – which to use highly technical language – means something is seriously borked.
Pressable tech support rolled the site back to PHP 7.4 because the error happened when we updated to 8.0. (I highly recommend Pressable for WordPress hosting. They are owned by Automattic, the parent corp of WordPress and quickly answer questions that more general hosts can’t or won’t.)
Ok, so the site had years old version of themes and plugins that I hadn’t updated for fear of borking something. But it now appeared they might be doing the borking themselves! Hmm.
So, I carefully updated everything on a test version, updated to PHP 8.0,and got the same 500 error again. Aargh.
Researched php upgrading on Pressable and found the PHP log files. The error is below. You might say, this is gibberish to me, Bob. Yes, it probably is. However, once I deleted the wp-config line everything was fine. Whew.
Please note how the error message said the line would create errors in future PHP versions.
Whee.
php-errors
“[01-Jan-2023 08:45:53 UTC] PHP Warning: Use of undefined constant minor – assumed ‘minor’ (this will throw an Error in a future version of PHP) in /srv/htdocs/wp-config.php on line 74”
wp-config, line 74
“define( ‘WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE’, minor );”