It’s WordPress Scramble Week!

The first sign of trouble is Google telling me that I’ve got multiple URLs going to the same page. That’s weird. How could that be happening?

So I go to my site. And I get a 500 error. All the links get 500 errors.

Uh oh.

Okay, okay, I know what causes this: radiospiral.net broke this way last week – Jetpack will happily update itself to a revision that isn’t supported by PHP 5.6 without checking (it needs PHP 7 at least once it upgrades itself).

So I go to my Hostgator CPanel to upgrade PHP.  Cool – I can upgrade it on all my sites with one click! I make PHP 7 the default, and check my site. Yep, all’s okay now. Job well done!

Hang on a second – shymaladasonphotography.com uses a custom plugin too and is hosted under this account, better check – and it’s rendering a PHP error.

AWESOME.

Switch PHP back to 5.6, log in to the photo site. Yeah, that was it. All right, I’ll upgrade the plugin, and no, I won’t, because they’ve dropped support for the version I purchased! All I need to do is upgrade to the Plus version…and at this point I decide that I need to do this myself.

So I go find a new theme, and install it. Now I need to reconstruct all the custom galleries. Go figure out where WordPress put the photos that were uploaded, since they’re not showing up in the media library as they should. Since they’re not there, I’ll have to get them there to be able to use them in standard widgets.

I turn on SSH for my site, download all the photos, edit the gallery pages, delete the old gallery widget, add a new image carousel widget, upload the photos again, rebuild the carousels, and set PHP back to 7.0 to unbreak my other sites again.

Photo site works, my site works, I think I’m done, and this has eaten an afternoon.

Considering strongly just coding everything by hand in HTML at this point.