After a couple of months of playing around with the WordPress 3 betas and release candidates, I have been mightily impressed by this platform. Matt Mullenweg has announced that WordPress 3 Theolonius has finally been release en masse. This is great news as the numerous features are awesome and there has been over 1200 bug fixes applied in the latest release. I did run into an issue with the admin back end though on one of my production sites – yes I tested everything else out on a couple of development boxes, but the old production environment always throws in a few gremlins to sort out. So let put some light on this one such gremlin.
Following standard procedure when upgrading manually, I deleted the wp-admin and wp-includes folders and then uploaded the new WP3 files and folders and performed a database upgrade. All good so far. I tested the actual site itself and that was up and running and working as expected. OK now to test the back end and make sure that is working as I don’t want my content editors to be bothered with something that isn’t quite right but rather be presented with the new look of the admin area.
Ok not the clean and fresh new admin interface I was expecting after logging in. A blank page! First things first – check the files are all there; check. Next, time to check out the log files on the server. The error logs were displaying a PHP error and this was the cause of the problem:
PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 368640 bytes) in /home/site/html/wp-admin/menu.php on line 214
So now we know that it is a PHP error and it is trying to allocate 32 MB to the process. resolving this will involve editing the php.ini file and upping the memory_limit parameter
memory_limit = 64M
I updated it to 64 MB as it was at a lowly 16 MB and I wanted a bit of future proofing. All that is required now is to restart the web server for the new setting to take effect. Now everything is working as expected
So if you upgrade to WP3 and can’t get into the back end – check your error logs!
