Wordpress CiviCRM site unusable after database upgrade from 5.4.0 to 5.5.1

Question

I'm relatively new to CiviCRM and am trying to get a client set up with the platform. I like it overall, it seems much more usable than most I've touched in the past.

All seemed to be going well until late last week. I had it basically set up on a third-party server. There might have been a resource path issue, or it might be a known testing bug (probably the latter).

Somewhere in there an upgrade was called for by Civi and I decided to give it a try. It appeared to work, but after the DB upgrade step I couldn't get to any Civi pages. I had to completely blow away Civi and start again to get anything displayed. Restoring the db from Backup brought me back to a somewhat usable state, but it wants to upgrade the db. I've tried a couple times with the same result.

I'm limping along right now with a db that says it needs to upgrade, but otherwise seems to work.

Looking around on the forums here, it seems like maybe I should be using an older version. The website seemed to be strongly steering me to 5.* so I assumed it was stable. I see here, people using 4.7 which I didn't even see on the website (all seemed to be 5.* and 4.6.*).

Any thoughts on either fixing this 5.5.1 problem or if I should be finding and running 4.7?

Answer 1

People using 4.7 are out of date - 4.7 is end-of-life. You should definitely go with 5.x for most use cases.

I would check your error logs in the ConfigAndLog directory - then come back here and edit your question to add the relevant logs. In general, there's a troubleshooting page in the documentation, but most of the suggestions aren't applicable to upgrade failures.