This is my first blog after upgrading to WordPress 5.1 from ver.4.8. Yes, I never tried 5.0 as it’s always risky to have a major upgrade to ver. x.0. The major difference is using Gutenberg as the post editor other than previous standard one or TinyMCE Advanced. For design of simplicity, Gutenberg is good.
Background
After installing WP Health, it’s shown that both MariaDB 5 (a default replacement of MySQL for CentOS7) and PHP5.6 are obsolete, i.e. no more formal support and no security patches will be released. It’s suggested to upgrade at least to MariaDB10 and PHP7.
Apart from security and support concern, it’s known that PHP7 has better performance than PHP5.
Issue
After upgrading, either the Virtualmin has problem in displaying submenu on the left panel or there’re “Internal Server Error” on some WordPress sites. It’s found out that during yum update MariaDB, it’s required to remove the old MariaDB5, however, for packages dependency needs, yum will at the same time remove Postfix and Virtualmin-base. If these 2 packages are reinstalled after upgrading to MariaDB, then WordPress has problem.
Solution
Use rpm -e –nodeps to skip removal of Postfix and Virtualmin-base.
Tricks
After removal PHP5.6, list out all the related packages, e.g. php-mysqlnd, php-gd, etc. depending on my case, there’re some others. All these have to be reinstalled after installing PHP7.2 base package.
For upgrade of PHP7, never upgrade to the lastest PHP7.3 as some of the PHP packages do not have PHP7.3 compatible rpm, only have PHP7.2 compatible rpm. There’re many CentOS PHP7 upgrade info. on the web, but some are not good, after try and error, I use TecAdmin.net’s advice and got no problem.
Config
- CentOS: 7.6
- Virtualmin 6.06
- WordPress 5.1
- MariaDB: 10.1
