I recently did some changes to my server and some time had lapsed before I needed to do anything on the wordpress installations on my machine. But for some reason the admin panel menus and javascript functions were not working on any of my wp installs. Which as of right now I haven’t fixed.  But if I do I will write a post and come back put a link.

But for this post, I found after doing some research on the required extensions to be loaded for wordpress. >> php_exif.dll being one of those.  But it was still commented out in my php.ini.  So the natural thing to do is uncomment and restart your services, but it crashed with the error below. EEK!  Hmmm.  The next thing is to check the directory for the dll. YUP! It was there.

Warning:
PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library ‘Path://todrive/ext/php_exif ‘ – The specified module could not be found.

The specified module could not be found.

Then I stumbled upon this post, iis-aid.com/php_exif.dll , which stated the php_mbstring.dll extension needed to load before the the php_exif.dll loads.  Inside my php.ini file the php_exif.dll was before the php_mbstring.dll in the list of extensions in my php.ini file.  Does that make sense? Why is that coming before the other if it can’t be loaded that way? Maybe it is a Windows thing. I’m guessing someone will comment on there theory or possibly even a logical reasoning behind.

Oh yeah, so for the fix you just need to move your php_mbstring.dll above your php_exif.dll in the php.ini file extensions list and make sure they are both uncommented, then restart your server.

This worked for me to get rid of this error. Probably not the only fix for this error, but it worked for me.  If you found this post and have had similar errors but this didn’t fix it, please share your findings.

Thanks!