Update below, maybe WordPress isn’t so bad after all?
I broke my WordPress self-hosted/managed site earlier simply by installing a theme, the one named ‘Default’.
The hosts’s AI troubleshooter failed miserably to make any form of difference when I started it.
To fix it ‘manually’ I first attempted to follow the help page linked to in the error message – go into myPHP and deactivate all the plugins.
Nope.
So then I searched for help directly related to WordPress themes and found the way to fix it is to delete the offending theme folder and rename an existing folder to the offending one.
Success, and I felt lucky I knew which theme was active.
And even more luckily everything is back up again.
My hosting plan includes only weekly automatic backups so yes, I just started one now.
Painful isn’t it, how something so complex can be broken by something so apparently simple as a site theme change.
Anyway, I just looked for similar issues with it and eventually arrived at the WordPress.org forum. The only response i found to its incompatibility with a previous version of PHP was the original poster replying to their own post to make a technical change within the theme file definition.
Pointless reporting it if there’s nowhere to report it, so I’ve given up and I’m sticking with ‘Simple Grey’.
Update: While attempting to fix my site I was sent an email from WordPress, “@bazbt3 🏡 Your Site is Experiencing a Technical Issue”. I was busy so didn’t notice it. The email described the fault and contained a special link to bypass the dashboard I couldn’t access – to enter a “special recovery mode”. Maybe now I know this is a thing, the next time the site breaks I’ll be more patient?