Thoughts Of A North Wales Web Developer

Role Scoper plugin for wordpress returning server error 500

Role scoper is a fantastic WordPress plugin, offering CMS like user roles. It allows you to specify what pages and posts individual members or groups of members can edit.

Just ran into this error. I installed role scoper and when I tried to activate the plugin, the entire wp-admin was returning a 500 Internal Server Error. After much searching I found the following simple fix.

The problem is that my hosting, with 1and1, uses php4 by default, what I needed to do was to tell the server to use php5 instead, which is the version that role scoper needs.

  1. Delete the role scoper directory and all of it’s contents from your remote plugin directory.
  2. Open your .htaccess file and paste in the following two lines
    AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
    AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php

Re-install role scoper and activate the plugin and it should work.

If you have come across any other errors or find that this solution doesn’t work, please comment below.