There is nothing quite like the haymaker of old. Coming out of nowhere. Stealing your breath. Forcing you off-kilter.
So there I was, updating my localhost copy of WordPress to 3.0 as I had done so many times without a thought on production servers. Come on! This is WordPress. It just works!
Before I could take another sip of coffee and click on a playlist, I was affronted by an unwelcome screen of errors shouting “Error 500” and “fastcgi.”
“Oh no” I thought. “Here we go again.” Just yesterday I had reluctantly installed IonCube’s PHP Loader (this allows encrypted PHP code to execute, which allows vendors to encrypt their PHP code, which allows you *not* to fiddle with it.) “Surely, this is the fault of IonCube!” I proclaimed. So, I fiddled with my php.ini file and rearranged things, and checked my PHP/ext/ folder to make sure everything the php.ini was looking for could be found. Nothing. Zero. Nada. Zip! Not the way I wanted to spend July 3rd. (Really, I should be out teaching my kids how to crimp “whistling peets” with pliers to make their own not-so-safe-and-sane version of the popular noisy tweeter.)
Curiously, all of my other PHP sites ran locally.
So, I poked around, checked the WordPress files and finally decided to update everything. New WordPress. New plugins. New coffee. In the process of updating the plugins, I first removed all of them from WordPress by simply moving the folder elsewhere temporarily. Voila! it worked! Well now. I’m so smart. It’s obviously some plugin not playing nice. I knew this all along!
So one by one I added them back in. Well, ok. I dumped most of them back in, and reloaded, and got the error screen again. So after taking chunks of them back out, eventually determined it was my tenuous friend, the “Events Calendar” plugin. This single plugin has caused me pain across many WordPress sites. It’s fragile. It breaks other stuff without regard for anyone’s feelings. But oh, it does what I need, so I put up with it!
So, out with the old, in with the new. I think I will keep a copy of Events Calendar around for the future, but I think it’s time to find a new way to manage my calendar within WordPress.