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On my HostGator shared hosting with a CPanel option to set PHP per domain, if I turn on PHP 7.3 (or other 7.x versions) for my existing blog I get an error page:

Warning: Use of undefined constant WP_CONTENT_DIR – assumed ‘WP_CONTENT_DIR’ (this will throw an Error in a future version of PHP) in /my_site/public_html/wp-includes/load.php on line 141 Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL extension which is required by WordPress

If I Google this, all the advice is about how to install mysqld, but it's surely already installed as doing a fresh install of WordPress on a separate sub-domain works perfectly under PHP 7.3, so I must be missing something in my older site's WordPress wp-config.php, perhaps. Looking at working and failing versions, though, I cannot see an obvious difference.

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  • How did you solve this? I have exactly the same problem. Jul 17, 2020 at 13:42
  • @TheOddAbhi I should update - it turned out I had an .htaccess in my root directory - the one above public_html - that had PHP 7.1-related commands that was mucking up the CPanel options. I've got a suspicion that I've been like that ever since I started with HostGator and they did an install for me from my previous host.
    – Ken Y-N
    Jul 18, 2020 at 16:22

5 Answers 5

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Here's what worked for me: My Hostgator WordPress site was throwing the same error until I commented out the top-level .htaccess file. Like so:

I commented out the PHP default settings

My website is a subdomain, so it had it's own .htaccess, so that's where the php version was specified (cpanel did this automatically). I didn't have to edit wp-config.php or anything else.

In the comments of this post is where I found this solution:

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/php-7-3-errors/#post-12720824

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Ensure WP_CONTENT_DIR is defined in your wp-config.php file. It will be the path to your wp-content directory.

define('WP_CONTENT_DIR', '/path/to/wordpress/wp-content');
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  • Thanks. This solved the issue for me. Not completely, but removed this error. Jul 17, 2020 at 13:51
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Normally, the WP_CONTENT_DIR entry is defined in the https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/files/wp-includes/default-constants.php/ file (which is loaded after wp-settings.php):

     if ( ! defined( 'WP_CONTENT_DIR' ) ) {
            define( 'WP_CONTENT_DIR', ABSPATH . 'wp-content' ); 
            // No trailing slash, full paths only - WP_CONTENT_URL is defined further down.
        }

This will set the WP_CONTENT_DIR to default of your site's 'wp-content' folder, unless you (or someone/something) has defined this previously in the wp-config.php with a command like this:

define('WP_CONTENT_DIR', '/path/to/wordpress/wp-content');

In a 'fresh'/default install, there should not be that DEFINE in the wp-settings file. Perhaps you have a plugin or function that has moved the content folder to a new location as a 'security' method (although it is debatable whether that is useful -'security by obscurity' doesn't work all that well) and modified the WP_CONTENT_DIR variable value.

So check your wp-settings.php file for that DEFINE statement. Remove it (unless you really want your wp-content files somewhere else), or look for a plugin in your site that is doing that.

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In my case, there were two .htaccess files running simultaneously (one from the "public_html" and one above the root directory), and it was causing the conflict. I removed the file, and it worked. I was able to get this fixed with my Wordpress version upgrade issue.

Here's the original post of this solution: https://iiiji.com/fix-php-upgrade-error-whm-cpanel/

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I just updated the PHP version 7.0 to 7.4 from Multi Php Editor for my website and I found the Use of undefined constant WP_CONTENT_DIR – assumed ‘WP_CONTENT_DIR’

After that, I degrade the version to 7.0 and got this error

Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL extension which is required by WordPress.

Again I upgraded to 7.4

How I solved the error? Just deleted the .htacess file and refresh. All worked fine for me.

Thanks

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  • That sounds strange to me. What was in the .htaccess file that broke PHP? I don't think you can disable the PHP MySQL extension from an .htaccess can you?
    – Rup
    Dec 17, 2020 at 8:25

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