Archive for the ‘Upgrades’ Category

March the 1st has been designated ‘make a donation for your plugin’ day, or buy a coffee for your coder day

The idea came from V S Ellis who mentioned it on his blog and in some forums.

Many of us use plugins and often the developers or coders provide extra help to get it just perfect for your needs, this is a way of saying thank you. Without them our WordPress blogs would look a lot different!

I shall be buying a few coffees for the people who have taken the time to create the plugins that I love.

If you take a look at V S Ellis’s blog, you’ll see he suggests the following hashtags/tweets

“I just donated to insert plugin name” #wppdd

Alternate ($ amount optional of course):

“I just donated to Plugin Developer to say thanks for the PluginName [insert short URL to plugin page or author]” – #wppd

“I just donated $x to Plugin Developer to say thanks for the PluginName [insert short URL to plugin page or author]” – #wppd

If you don’t know who your plugin creators are, just leave us a comment with the name of your plugin and we’ll tell you who coded it.

Sarah

Upgrading to the latest version of WordPress using the automatic option from within your Dashboard will generally be a straightforward task, especially if you only use the simplest of plug-ins.

However – it’s that 1% of times that it really is worth being prepared for – the one time that you upgrade with a resulting blank screen – the “white screen of death” it can be called (somewhat melodramatically, in my opinion).

When to action your WordPress upgrade?

I tend to wait a couple of days after each WordPress version upgrade; this gives the creators of the most popular and well-tended plug-ins a chance to test their work on the latest version of WordPress. So it therefore makes sense to upgrade any plugins that require such before upgrading your WordPress.

So then you want to take your backup, de-activate your plugins, and then carry out the WordPress upgrade. Once that’s successfully completed remember to activate your plugins, perhaps one by one to be quite happy that each will work happily with the new version of WordPress.

And just remember that if anything does go wrong, it will most likely be a plugin incompatibility, and this can be sorted out by connecting to the server using your ftp details and moving or deleting the most likely plugin culprit (the whole folder from within /wp-content/plugins).

If you want any guidance, clarification or someone to virtually hold your had while you action any of this, drop me an email at hello@blogmistress.com

If you haven’t realised already (the blogosphere and twitter is afire today with this update), it is essential that you upgrade your WordPress to the latest version as a matter of priority.

It seems there’s a worm on the loose that is targetting older versions of WordPress – so spending the time to upgrade now could save you a lot of time should you get attacked.  Full details of the situation from WordPress central: How to keep WordPress secure

Remember, when upgrading:

• Backup your WordPress database
• Deactivate your plugins
• Then upgrade

Related post: Disable your plugins before upgrading WordPress

If you need a hand or guidance, let us know…  Email hello@blogmistress.com, call 0845 644 0709 or add your comment below.

Today I merrily set about the latest upgrade to WordPress – just from 2.8.1 to 2.8.2 – and learned a valuable lesson or two (in good time for the next upgrade to 2.8.3 which was hot on its heels!)

Part way through the upgrade, using the WP-Automatic-Upgrade plugin (which is no longer necessary, but we’ll deal with that later) – everything went white – the screen was blank.  And the website too – the infamous “white wall” that is referred to in such instances.

Now I know that a compatibility issue with the plugins can be the most likely cause of problems – that’s generally the first thing to look at.  So using my trusty FireFTP to connect, I renamed the plugins folder to explugins, creating a new one of the original name, with nothing in it (this is a quick way to disable all plugins if you cannot get to the WP control panel).  Still no joy!  So then I thought I’d see what the server logs might have to say about it all – only to find that I’d used up all of the diskspace! Aha!  Now this is a website that includes a shop, so indeed needs it’s space and I’d been a bit thorough in my server housekeeping, it seems.

The immediate action was to increase the space available, which of course did not resolve the WordPress upgrade issue – that would have been too easy!  What had happened is some of the files had been upgraded/uploaded, and some had not.  The only thing for it was to manually upload the new version of WordPress – downloading, upzipping and then replacing all the files (except those in the wp-content folder, of course – that’s where all the theme stuff is kept and I did not fancy re-doing all of that again!).

Now – all upgrades will include the following as standard, instead of thinking that I am immune from such mini-disasters!

Always, before you action your WordPress upgrade, go to your plugins, select them all, choose the “deactivate” option and Apply.

Then you can upgrade your WordPress, hopefully with no hiccups (that’s a whole other blog post!), and when done you can pop back to your Plugins section and activate each, one by one.

And