This site recently went through a back-end upgrade from PHP 4 to PHP 5, which allows more flexibility and should improve site performance. Unfortunately, the upgrade wasn’t especially smooth, with the process involving quite a few hiccups within the WordPress framework I use. I couldn’t relably add or activate plugins—either getting a blank screen after activating or not being able to download it from WordPress.org (beyond a .tmp file that showed up in my FTP files). This is one big reason (along with trying to start wedding planning, working on finalizing two articles for submission and one for publication, and several other things) I haven’t been able to post nearly as much as I’d have liked recently.

Anyway, this was a big problem, and I couldn’t seem to find a solution—eventually, I was getting blank pages throughout my WordPress admin screens (unable to access anything or change anything). Numerous threads in the WordPress.org help forums testify to similar problems, but it wasn’t until I found this blog post that I was finally able to fix things (apparently the new server is 64 bit, not 32, which caused problems with the wp-settings default memory handling). So, everything is up and running smoothly again, and I’m glad to be back.