I host this blog on my own server. Further, I use a blogging engine the name of which the reader can see plainly on the site, which is partly installed via the Debian package manager, and partly via in-place downloading and updating of extensions via plug-ins.
Just tonight, the Debian team put through a package-originated update to ‘WordPress.org‘, which has happened smoothly in the past, and the nature of which I have integrated with my particular site quite well.
But immediately after the WordPress.org update tonight, the blog went off-line briefly, and I feared the worst – that I had made chopped beef out of my local configuration of files.
But what I found instead, this time around, dismayed me: In the file named
/usr/share/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php
There is a re-declaration of three functions, in principle:
wp_json_encode()
_wp_json_sanity_check()
_wp_json_convert_string()
Since these three functions have been redeclared within the same code file, that belongs to
/usr/share/wordpress
And belonging to the package, there was no way the blog could have sent off any HTML at all – regardless of what my plug-in settings might have been. It is baffling that Debian Team would make the error, of declaring the same functions twice within the same file.
I simply had to comment out the offending functions, and my blog works again, plug-ins, theme and all.
So it would seem that the code that keeps WordPress.org running, is malleable after all, so that I was able to restore order within my files.
Dirk
(Edit : ) I suppose that for the next few hours or days, the readers might notice that the blog engine is rather sluggish. This is due to the fact that I needed to clear my cache. But clearing the cache on this server would have been necessary anyway. I had the whole maneuver planned out so carefully – To put the blog into maintenance mode, to clear the cache, to change a directory permission, to apply the update, to re-owner the folders, and to deactivate maintenance mode…
Such a shame the the code did not play nice this time.
This affected the blog from about 21h30 until 22h45.