Wordpress 3.8.3 3.9 upgrade issue.

Just recently moved a domain from another host to my newly setup Debian Wheezy nginx setup on a VPS.
For some reason I kept getting error 500 trying to load a page no matter what I did.
Checked the logs and saw

Code:

 FastCGI sent in stderr
 PHP Parse error:  syntax error, unexpected 'array' (T_ARRAY)
 while reading response header from upstream
  /var/www/clients/client2/web1/web/wp-includes/formatting.php on line 1691

Line 1691 in the formatting.php file is pretty short:

Code:

		return $matches[0];

After trying all the suggested site moving fixes I could find, like changing the .htaccess file, disabling plugins & themes, etc. - it occured to me that I had already moved another site that was using Wordpress and it had worked without any issues.

Further investigation revealed the working site was using Wordpress 3.8.3. So I downgraded the non working site from 3.9 to 3.8.3 and it worked instantly.

So the question is - Why did 3.9 break?

PHP is on PHP Version 5.4.4-14+deb7u9
MySQL version is 5.5.37-0+wheezy1

Any ideas? Has anybody else seen this issue yet?

 

Just to make it even stranger. I tired doing a new wordpress install with version 3.8.3 on a different site. I used the same files that somehow magically fixed the existing site. All I get is an error 500. And in the error log for the site ( /var/log/ispconfig/domain ) here is what I get.

Code:

2014/05/03 15:31:23 [error] 15696#0: *19650 FastCGI sent in stderr: "PHP message: PHP Parse error:  syntax error, unexpected 'to' (T_STRING) in /var/www/clients/client2/web2/web/wp-includes/taxonomy.php on line 2060" while reading response header from upstream, client: bbb.aaa.xxx.yyy, server: domain.com, request: "GET /wp-admin/install.php HTTP/1.0", upstream: "fastcgi://unix:/var/lib/php5-fpm/web2.sock:", host: "domain.com"

(Domain name and IP address have been changed)

 

Here are my Nginx directives

Code:

client_max_body_size 100M;

location / {
         try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
}

location /roundcube {
         root /var/lib/;
         index index.php index.html index.htm;
         location ~ (.+\.php)$ {
                    try_files $uri =404;
                    include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
                    # To access SquirrelMail, the default user (like www-data on Debian/Ubuntu) must be used
                    #fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
                    fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
                    fastcgi_index index.php;
                    fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
                    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
                    fastcgi_buffer_size 128k;
                    fastcgi_buffers 256 4k;
                    fastcgi_busy_buffers_size 256k;
                    fastcgi_temp_file_write_size 256k;
         }
         location ~* /.svn/ {
                     deny all;
         }
         location ~* /README|INSTALL|LICENSE|SQL|bin|CHANGELOG$ {
                     deny all;
         }
}
location /webmail {
         rewrite ^ /roundcube last;
}

location /phpmyadmin {
root /usr/share/;
index index.php index.html index.htm;
location ~ ^/phpmyadmin/(.+\.php)$ {
try_files $uri =404;
root /usr/share/;
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_param HTTPS on; # <-- add this line
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_buffer_size 128k;
fastcgi_buffers 256 4k;
fastcgi_busy_buffers_size 256k;
fastcgi_temp_file_write_size 256k;
fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
}
location ~* ^/phpmyadmin/(.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|css|png|js|ico|html|xml|txt))$ {
root /usr/share/;
}
}
location /phpMyAdmin {
rewrite ^/* /phpmyadmin last;
}

 

Just installed latest wordpress 3.9 from wordpress.org and it works ok. It seems that its something about the update that makes you problems.
Also Im using mod-php not suphp.

 

It's just been so inconsistent so far on how it reacts to WP. like it worked fine moving over a WP 3.8.3 site, but not moving 3.9 using the same procedure. ( Import database, move files, update config )
And yesterday got errors trying to create a brand new 3.8.3 site with a blank database. Then just for grins I decided to try it with the 3.9 - and it worked!

I don't mind if there are things that will or will not work on my system as long as I know what they are, and why they won't work so I can explain that to customers.

I did at some point during this adventure restart both nginx and php5-fpm. But did not make any configuration changes to either.

Code:

service php5-fpm restart
service nginx restart

Scratching my head on this one a bit. For now I'm just going to ignore it and move on, I guess. It's a low volume server, 10 or so sites. Only 2 of which are running Wordpress and one of those is a personal site.