500 Internal Server Error with WordPress 3.0

Recently I finally got around to upgrading this site (and several others) to WordPress 3.0 and everything went smoothly until I tried to login to my admin page, where I was greeted by this lovely message:

Error 500 – Internal server error
An internal server error has occurred!
Please try again later.

Wonderful.

Turns out that this error was caused by the way my host, 1&1, parses PHP files and while it’s rather annoying, it’s at least relatively easy to fix. I should note that technically WordPress 3.0 also shares some of the blame, as it requires parts be run through PHP5 (1&1 by default uses PHP 4 to parse scripts).

Here’s how to fix it…

Create a new text document with Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on Mac, paste these lines of code into it and save the document as htaccess.txt.


AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php


Using your FTP program, copy your newly created file into the root directory of your WordPress install.

Next rename it to .htaccess

Head back to your WordPress install and all should be right in the world.

Note: WordPress has officially dropped support for PHP4 in all future releases, so this trick might become be even more useful in the near term. Hopefully 1&1 will get their act together before the next WordPress release though.