So finally I’ve been forced to embrace HestiaCP.  For a few months  I was able to get away with using the WordPress Dashboard to update and maintain my Website.  But woe behold when after an absence of about five months I had issues with my WP site.  It started with a WP login page that was  very crude and missing CSS.  And then a post text box that was unresponsive. I thought to remedy this with a brand-new installation of WordPress.

Alas, this remedy didn’t work.  With the first new installation the CSS issue was even worse than with the old deleted installation.  I found myself battling with all kinds of challenges over and above learning the little quirks of HestiaCP workings.

Finally after about 4 attempts of loading WordPress, I get a new post text box that worked.  Initially I had thought it was a HestiaCP issue, but am now more inclined to blame this on an incompatibility with php 8.0.  WordPress is known to be not quite ready yet for php 8.0 with 7.4 recommended as more ideal.  Another possibility may have been the updated Block Editor of the new WP Version 6.0.  However, I had no problem with this with the WordPress installations on my VPS.  So php 8.0 is the only difference with my VPS.  I have php 7.3 installed on my VPS.

Back to my learning experience with HestiaCP, the first challenge was getting into HestiaCP when my user name and password didn’t want to work.  When it finally worked I found HestiaCP automatically logging me out with each new step I took which meant I was unable to create a new database.  I then submitted a ticket to KuJoe, who fixed the problem for me by editing the security settings.  So after a few hours I could finally reinstall WordPress.  Then followed all kinds of challenges until after my fourth try, finally, for the first time the installation seemed to come up with normal WordPress CSS.

So here are some of the lessons I learned with my first use of the HestiaCP User Panel.

HestiaCP has a very solid File Manager, however if one navigates in it, the UNZIP tool is not in the tool menu.  When this happened to me the first time round I used FileZilla to upload the files, but that took ages to do and was horribly time consuming.  However after some research with Google I discovered that instead of ticking the box next to the zipped folder to bring up the menu where the UNZIP tool was missing, one is supposed to rightclick over the zipped folder, which would then bring up a list of tools including the UNZIP tool.  Compared with FileZilla the unzip experience was as fast as lightning.  I see the File Manager definitely as an improvement over VestaCP.

Speed Up – Clean WP new plugin: One of the issues with creating new posts was a pop up note that a min.js file could not be found.  Resulting in an unresponsive text box as well as inability to edit posts.  I then did some research to see whether there was a plugin that could solve the problem and the WordPress.org Speed-Up-Clean-WP plugin worked like magic.  It completely solved the problem with new posts and the text box was back to its former responsive self.  The pop up message didn’t appear again. When I did research on the plugin one of the reviews said it broke her WP installation.  Hopefully that will not happen, so time will tell.  At least I now know to aim at optimizing WP plugins for solving the problem.

Classic Widgets plugin:  Two other big issues were the widgets page and the customize function were not working.  Both pages came up blank.  Apparently this had to do with the new WP 6.0 release Block Editor which took over these two functions.  Again, when I did research I discovered the wordpress.org Classic Widgets plugin. I was most relieved to get the customize function back as well as the ability to edit the widgets of my Twenty Thirteen WordPress theme.

In conclusion and so far, I think HestiaCP User Panel is a bit simpler than VestaCP.  Once I got it working and KuJoe helped with resetting some of the security settings I was able to install WordPress fairly effortlessly.  All of the frustrations were mostly due to WP’s conflicts with php 8.0 and conflicts with the Block Editor of the new WP 6.0 version.