What version of Concrete5 is required to work with PHP 8.1?

Dreamhost recently upgraded my Concrete5 site to PHP 8.1 and I received notices from that process that it found no problems. However, this morning, when I first tried to access it after the update (after a hiatus from work), I found that when I click past the plain HTML “front page,” a completely blank (white) page is displayed. No attempt to refresh the page, in more than one browser, brought up the PHP portion of the site. I am using one of the basic, default site styles. Nothing fancy at all: www.ffez.com/site

I can roll back to PHP v7.4, but only temporarily.

I attempted to use the admin page to download an update, but it only shows that version 8.5.12 is available, not version 9—and the download process failed, anyway. However, my understanding is that Concrete5 version 8 is not compatible with PHP 8.1.

Is there a support page that can show me exactly how to update to version 9? Assume that nothing “automatic” will work, as that has been my experience in the past with full number versions. Thanks!

You are correct, you must have v9 to upgrade to PHP8+

You will need to upgrade to v8.5.12 before you can upgrade to v9. To upgrade make a database backup, and a backup of your application/config directory (I have found this to be needed to restore if you have to) and then follow one of the paths in this documentation - How to Upgrade Concrete CMS

I always use the Command Line method because of the amount of time that is needed to upgrade, but other people are able to get by with the dashboard methods too.