Crashing after update

• radavi

• January 28, 2020 at 6:45 pm

hi there,

I am trying to help someone with an slightly outdated website (made somewhere in 2012). I got a bunch of stuff working but having a problem with Advanced Custom Fields.
Active version is: 4.4.6, when I try to update it crashes the wordpress. Since I do not have access to plesk/cpanel/ftp/whatever no way of getting to logfiles or anything usefull.

Also installed Advanced Custom Fields: Flexible Content Field.
this one is up to date…but when trying to make a new page it gives an error on
acf-flexible-content/includes/4-0/acf-flexible-content-field.php on line 301.
From which I learned there is also a 5-0 and a 5-4 directory. What is that all about?

If anyone can help me in some direction it would be helpful

• Daniel Buth

• January 30, 2020 at 10:15 am

Well, two things:

Firstly, like when someone goes on the internet and asks: “What is the average amount of tar in a cigarette,” and a hundred people just ignore the question and immediately post: “STOP SMOKING” in all-caps, this is going to be a bummer, but: Are you absolutely certain, that you have to update this website, that was built in the era of Internet Explorer 10, and that it would not be much easier to migrate the data into a fresh install?

Secondly, if you are certain, that it is necessary: Have you tried deactivating all plugins, updating WordPress, then updating the plugins one by one, and then re-activating them one by one? In any case, please make a copy of the database.

• radavi

• January 30, 2020 at 6:25 pm

Of course you are right, it is a very old site. But that is also kind of the reason why I am not willing to change it. First the owner of the site does not want anything changed, and second, there are many old things edited in theme etc.

Wordpress is updated, all other plugins as well. Have not tried the deactivate everything and reactivate one by one yet…but will do

• John Huebner

• February 3, 2020 at 4:08 am

There are extremely large differences in the way that ACF4 and ACF5 stored information. There is an upgrade guide for this https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/resources/upgrade-guide-version-5/

In addition to this, depending on what version of WP you started with there have been changes in the way WP stores data, as one example in 4.2 there was a split of taxonomy terms when associated with more than one post type and these changes also effected the way ACF stored data.

There are also function in ACF that were available and other things that had name changes that could cause a crash to happen.

Another thing that can cause errors is the PHP version on your server. Many things in both WP and ACF will not run correctly if the server is running an older version of WP and the reverse is true, some things will crash if you’re running the latest PHP and a plugin has not been updated to work on that PHP version.

More than likely, on a site this old I would have updated WP to the most recent minor version, for example if they were on WP 4.4.3 I would have updated to 4.4.21 and then left it there. But this really depends on where you started. As Daniel said, sometimes it’s just better to leave things alone. After a certain amount of time a site needs to be rebuilt, that’s just the way it is.

Beyond this what is needed is a better explanation of why the site is crashing and I would recommend turning on error display so that you have the information you need to debug the issues https://codex.wordpress.org/WP_DEBUG

• radavi

• February 5, 2020 at 6:23 pm

With all plugins deactivated the system was able to update ACF. It all came down to the database update that was needed I suppose