Blank site + admin dashboard after upgrading Pro to 2.1.1

Hello,

After upgrading my site to Pro 2.1.1 from 2.0.4 this morning, upon clicking either of the “Return” links, I was greeted with a completely blank screen. Refreshing resulted in the same. I then tried to go to the site itself, and also received a completely blank screen. Checking source on the page revealed that there was no content in the page whatsoever; it was literally an empty head and an empty body between two html tags. Thankfully, I was able to roll back my installation to a backup from yesterday, so all is well… for now.

I also received HTTP 500 errors on both WP admin and live site at points during this exercise. According to my hosting status, the server is running PHP 5.6.36.

Any ideas as to what’s going on here?

Thanks,
Jeff

Hi Jeff,

Do you have any error logs from that 500 error? Would you mind providing WordPress login and FTP credentials (you can do this in a secure note)? We could try updating the site and see what’s going on. Thanks!

No logs, unfortunately. Site info sent via secure note.

Thanks,
Jeff

Thanks! I was able to confirm this is actually related to the known issue in the release notes: https://theme.co/apex/forum/t/release-notes-pro-2-1-x-6-1-cornerstone-3-1/33890

That site is actually running PHP version 5.3.29. While I was in there with FTP I made the adjustment to prevent it from happening again. You should also be safe to update to the next release which includes the fix.

You may want to reach out to your host and find out what the discrepancy is regarding PHP version. Version 5.3.29 is “End of Life” and doesn’t get security updates anymore so it could be a risk.

Thanks, Alexander. Can you let me know what adjustments you made?

I’ll check with the host to find out what’s going on with the PHP version.

Thanks!
Jeff

Follow-up: I noted that the cPanel for my sites have an option to change the installed PHP; it also noted the 5.3 version that you mentioned. I changed it to v5.6, so hopefully that will resolve the issues going forward?

Thank you for your help!
Jeff

I just copied the fixed file for the next release into your site. That way it works for now but will be fixed with the update as well.

Yes, whenever possible you want to use PHP 5.6 or later as that is the lowest supported version. We will always try to be compatible with versions back as far as 5.2 because that’s what WordPress supports but we don’t do full testing with versions older than 5.6.

Thank you!

You’re welcome!