So…I fixed the problems caused by the November updates. Everything looked good. Then life got complicated again, and I didn’t get around to adding new posts. Today, after waiting to see whether other sites had problems with the WP4.4 update, I finally updated this site.
Ooopsie!
This time, not just scrambled layouts and image weirdness. This time, the whole danged site disappeared. Even the login screen showed a 500 error. What’s that, you ask? According to Wikipedia:
500 Internal Server Error
A generic error message, given when an unexpected condition was encountered and no more specific message is suitable.
Fat lot of help THAT is!
Tried 87 fixes suggested by WP forums and a couple of user groups. Nothing worked. After wasting way too much time, I went in through my hosting service’s cpanel and deleted every WP-related file and folder, uploaded a clean copy of WP4.4 and restored my database and image files from backups.
So far, so good. Using the default 2016 theme, most things seem to be back where they belong. Now, I get to restoring my child theme and plug-ins one at a time until something breaks again.
<sarcasm>
What fun!
</sarcasm>
