Some Blog Site

I had a blogging emergency last week. I went to write the blog post and WordPress wasn’t working. The page I normally use to sign in to write things was broken – it just said “Error establishing a database connection”

I had gone through a similar problem a few weeks before when a client requested a PHP update, which I did and then her WordPress blog stopped working so I had to revert PHP back to 5.x that we were using.

So I went into my hosting configuration and saw that they had updated everyone’s PHP to 7.3.

Ugh.

No choice to remain at 5.x.

I do not like automatic upgrades. I do not like updates in general. I keep an old phone and I decline any updates – my phone’s performance never slows down and I never have any problems with things not working like they used to.

Anyway, I got updated and now I had to deal with it. Because reverting PHP was not an option, I figured I must have to update my WordPress version. Since, you know, I turned off automatic updates and kept it at the version I liked. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Well, now it’s broken so now I have to fix it.

Most of the “how to update WordPress” sites let me know that I can login to my blog and then click the Update button. Those were not helpful because I couldn’t get into my blog. But one of sites was actually helpful and I followed their instructions to download the WordPress install zip file, remove the wp-content directory, then upload that modified zip file into the website and it would be good.

I did that, and tried again. I know the update worked because now the error message had a new font. But it was the same error message. My new WordPress version is now 5.7, and I think the old one was 4.something.

So all that investigating and updating did nothing for me.

I found a handy thingy that let me check what the connection problem was. It involved making a test PHP file that returns mysqli_error, and that told me “The server requested authentication method unknown to the client”

So more Google-fu and the main thread seemed to be with the username and password. A suggested fix was to either alter the current username’s authentication method or create a new username with a different authentication method than the old username.

I created a new username in my host server’s MySQL setup, but I didn’t see anywhere to modify the authentication method. But it kind of worked. Now when I went to the login page I got a notice from WordPress that my site crashed and I’d get an email with some help.

So I checked my email and, sure enough, there was a helpful email that gave me a link to log into my WordPress with safe mode. I guess that was one advantage of upgrading my WordPress version.

I logged in using safe mode and I disabled the offending WP plugin and then everything was magically working again.

Moral of the story: if your WordPress installation stops working, don’t just upgrade things. Check what the problem is with mysqli_error and go from there. New MySQL usernames are free – accidentally overwriting files or losing settings during an update is not free.

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