Today I was updating WordPress from 2.9.1 to 3.1 and of course ran into an error. After I uploaded a new version of the engine to ftp, the blog stopped opening (both the frontend and the admin panel) and gave out only the classic “500 Internal Server Error” message.
Redownloading did not help, looking under the hood did not help either. I rushed to look for a solution to the problem on the Internet and it turned out that there were very few Russian articles about it. Strange, am I the only lucky one? I tried more and more search queries, but the result was disappointing.
I had to look in the logs on the hosting…
Problem solved in one second!
The following was written in the logs:
SoftException in Application.cpp:249: File "/home/.../public_html/index.php" is writeable by group
This means that the system refuses to work until I set stricter permissions on the files in the root of the site. After all, when updating the engine, I allowed writing to both index.php and other files.
To return WordPress to work and say goodbye to “Error 500 Internal Server Error” it was enough to once again set permissions to 444 on all php files in the root of the site .