Wordpress and PHP 5.3

Question

Can anyone offer any suggestions as to why wp-admin/options-general.php won't load on my Wordpress installation in PHP 5.3? If I enable debugging and then have PHP report errors, I do get deprecation errors, but they don't seem relevant. Further, if I fix these errors, the page still does not load.

The top bar and several navigation boxes load, but nothing inside the central frame?

I am running dotdeb's PHP 5.3

Output with WP_DEBUG and error_reporting(0):

Deprecated: Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated in /home/willyum/willyum.info/blog/wp-includes/cache.php on line 103

Deprecated: Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated in /home/willyum/willyum.info/blog/wp-includes/pomo/mo.php on line 171

Deprecated: Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated in /home/willyum/willyum.info/blog/wp-includes/l10n.php on line 407

Deprecated: Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated in /home/willyum/willyum.info/blog/wp-includes/query.php on line 61

Deprecated: Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated in /home/willyum/willyum.info/blog/wp-includes/theme.php on line 1133

Deprecated: Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated in /home/willyum/willyum.info/blog/wp-includes/taxonomy.php on line 617

Answer 1

If I remember correctly, wordpress uses lots of @ operator to avoid the display of errors... So, many of those are not displayed, event if error_reporting is activated :-(
(That's one of the reasons that @ operator is evil... )

Maybe using the scream extension on your testing machine, to disabled the @ operator, could help ?

Still, I've just tried wordpress on PHP 5.3, and that page seems to load fine... I'm using a 2.8.x version, btw

Answer 2

Try disabling all Plugins that you have installed. If it solves the problem, then try to enable each Plugin one my one to find out the offending Plugin.

You can also use wp-devel Plugin to find out the function trace. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-devel/

Answer 3

Maybe Wordpress debug (Pear and more) plugins? would help? (I haven't used any myself.)