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Another WordPress Update? This Time, 2.8.4

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Aug 14, 2009

Man, this is starting to get irritating. Suddenly there’s another WordPress update, this time 2.8.4. It supposedly closes another security hole that they just discovered, but in reading the explanation, it doesn’t make a lot of sense:

“Yesterday a vulnerability was discovered: a specially crafted URL could be requested that would allow an attacker to bypass a security check to verify a user requested a password reset. As a result, the first account without a key in the database (usually the admin account) would have its password reset and a new password would be emailed to the account owner. This doesn’t allow remote access, but it is very annoying.”

Nope, means nothing to me. However, this is the fourth update in two months, since WordPress 2.8 was only released on June 10th. That they keep having problems with security holes, and things like internal server errors is irritating enough.

My gripe is that they still haven’t fixed whatever the problem is that keeps many of us from being able to use the automatic upgrade that supposedly comes with it. I say supposedly because ever since they added that to the WordPress software, instead of us using plugins to do the job, I haven’t been able to an automatic upgrade to a new version on any of my blogs, which I could do easily before, and some plugins won’t update either.

I’ve read where some folks say that we’re supposed to go into our server control panels and make some changes, but if that’s the case then why did it work before? Nope, I’m not buying it, and I wish they’d work on that as an issue. I did call my host to ask them about this problem, since many forums said it would be the hosting companies, and the person on the other end of the line had absolutely no idea what I was talking about, which means they haven’t been flooded with calls asking for assistance on the matter.

Well, I’ll think about upgrading this one. Based on their patterns, they’ll be releasing another update in two or three weeks, and I could wait for that one. I need to think about it; I crave security as much as the next person, and still love WordPress, but this, you have to admit, is getting a little bit ridiculous.

WordPress 2.8.1; This Is More Like It

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jul 10, 2009

If you remember, about a month ago I griped about WordPress 2.8 and all the things it seemingly messed up on my Top Finance Blog. I said that until they made some fixes to it that I wasn’t touching my other blogs.

Well, along comes 2.8.1, and I decided it was time to give it a shot. I first upgraded TFB, and saw that it immediately fixed some stuff that wouldn’t work before. Boosted by that, I decided to upgrade my business blog first, even though I have more posts there, and it’s older, but it gets less traffic than this blog. It went very well, and almost everything works perfectly. I did the same for this blog just a couple of minutes ago, and once again, almost everything works perfectly.

What isn’t working perfectly? You know how, on the dashboard, if you’re paying attention, there’s incoming messages on WordPress development and recent links to your site? Well, on TFB it’s working, but not on these other two blogs. It says it’s loading, but nothing’s coming up. However, since that’s something I rarely look at, it’s a minor inconvenience.

Of course, I will add this. I upgraded the lazy way today, which I blame on our friend Sire. I decided to do what he does and just upload things without taking the time to delete a ton of files and then do the upgrade. The reason? My FTP doesn’t allow you to delete a folder unless you delete everything that’s in the folder, and some of those folders have multiple folders with other folders and, a couple of times, other folders. It’s a long, involved process to keep deleting all that stuff. So, instead, I just uploaded the new wp-admin and wp-includes folders and let them overwrite what was already there. I did know better, and I hope you do also, than to upload the wp-content folder; do NOT do that unless you’re totally new to WordPress and haven’t created your blog yet.

However, there is one thing you should do in wp-content if you didn’t upgrade to WordPress 2.8 before. They have changed the look of both the classic and default WordPress themes, and not that you’d ever want to go back to those if you had a choice, but you never know if you need to do some theme maintenance and need to pop back to the “original” for a quick minute. So, go into wp-content, then themes, and upload the new Classic and Default folders.

One final thing. Before you do copy files over, or any other upgrade, always deactivate your plugins. Then, when you finally come back, if things aren’t working immediately, check your plugins to see if one of them might be messing things up. In the case of this blog, I had to deactivate my Subscribe To Comments plugin, which isn’t needed with 2.8.1 anymore.

Now I’m updated, protected, and relatively happy; I’m glad they got things right.

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WordPress 2.8 Update

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jun 15, 2009

Okay, by now, y’all know that things just don’t always go right with me. At the same time, you know I usually find an answer.

Saturday, I decided I was going to update my blogs to 2.8. I figured this would have to go well for at least one of them, since WP has changed over to automatic updating, eliminating the old update plugin that I happened to like a lot.

As it figures, none of my blogs would do that automatic update; ugh. That meant that I was going to have to download the program and do the update manually.

Now, I know Sire said with 2.7.1 that all he did was just load files over the original program and things worked like a charm for him. Well, you’re not really supposed to do that, especially when you’re upgrading to a whole new version, which this is. What you have to do if updating manually is delete certain files. You delete the entire folder that says WP-Admin, and the one that says WP-Includes, and some other junk. But, with a FTP program, it won’t let you delete a folder without deleting stuff within each folder, which sometimes means you have to go layer by layer by layer to get everything out, and delete each folder once it’s empty before moving to the next one.

That’s the process I hate more than any other because it just seems to take so long. It’s not hard to do, but I hate it. Luckily, you don’t have to touch the WP-Content folder usually, although this time there was a folder that you had to replace; seems that with this version they’ve changed the default WP theme. Finally!

Anyway, I decided to start with my finance blog, Top Finance Blog, since it’s the newest, and therefore has the least amount of content. I deleted all the files I was supposed to, then uploaded everything I was supposed to. Oh yeah, before doing any of that I disabled all the plugins on that blog, and backed up the files.

Then I went to the blog, where it told me it had to update the database. Did that, got in, and things looked a little different, but no big deal. The big deal came when I went to the plugins page and tried to activate them. Suddenly I was getting that Internal Error 500, which doesn’t mean almost anything to me. I wasn’t a happy guy. I was initially able to go backwards, which took me back to the plugins page, but no further. Luckily, the reading part of the blog that everyone sees was still working properly, so if I’d had any visitors they’d have been fine, but I couldn’t get into admin.

I tried various tricks for about 5 minutes, then went to the WordPress main page. It gave me nothing; it had some ideas about troubleshooting, but it didn’t mention that. I didn’t panic, but I was irked. I then knew it was time to go onto the search engines and find my answer.

I found it pretty quickly, but didn’t believe it. On a site called Code Different, there was an interesting fix on a long topic title, Solution for 500 Internal Server Error after upgrading to WordPress 2.7 at 1and1-server. What it said is that error means you’re PHP has run out of memory. I’d never heard of any such thing, but there it was. The fix? Open Notepad, type in “memory=20MB“, and save the file as “php.ini“. Then upload it to your WP-Admin directory and you’re all set.

Frankly, my mind was skeptical. All this technology and the solution was that simple? Still, it was simple after all, so I did it, uploaded, and viola, there I was. I was stunned! I wrote a comment on his blog thanking him for the simple fix. Today, I’m still stunned, but it worked, and now I’ll be taking some time to upgrade my other blogs. By the time you read this I’ll probably have already done them all.

So, there you go. Safety first, then if you have my problem a simple resolution. Life doesn’t get much better than that.

Upgrade To WordPress 2.7.1; How?

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Feb 17, 2009

For at least a week I’ve been seeing this notification at the top of my blog, in the administration area, telling me to update to WordPress 2.7.1. Well, obviously it’s still there, and I still haven’t upgraded, but it’s not for a lack of trying.

On all three of my blogs, which are all WordPress blogs, I have clicked on the button that asked me if I wanted to upgrade automatically; nothing happened. I thought about downloading the update and loading it myself, but I decided against it because, after all, isn’t that why I added the Automatic Upgrade Plugin to begin with?

So, after numerous tries on each blog, I decided it was time to go online to see if anyone else had a fix for it. Of course, I wasn’t close to being alone with this issue. And there are fixes galore, but they involve, well, some interesting differences. The first is that you have to totally kill the Automatic Upgrade Plugin, which supposedly counters the upgrade program that was inserted into WordPress 2.7 to begin with; I didn’t know that. You don’t just inactivate the plugin; you have to totally delete it from your blog. Well, I figured that was easy to try, so I did, then tried to update my blog; nope, wasn’t happening.

Then I read something else that said to inactive all plugins and that would work. I did that, and I got to the next stage, which came with a message that said “unpacking the core update”; that’s as far as that went.

Someone else said you had to not only inactivate all of your plugins, but delete them as well. At that point I said “no”, it’s not happening. I have a bunch of plugins, and I have all the settings just the way I want them, and I’m not about to go through all that trouble for an update. Someone tell me why WordPress had to mess with the automatic upgrade process, please.

So, why not just download the update and load it manually? I did some reading on that, and it seems that many people either lost their blogs entirely or lost some feature of their blogs. I decided I wasn’t going through all of that noise, even though I may be a bit more technically minded than many people. Though the original process used to only take about five minutes, it’s been awhile since I’ve even had to attempt it, and I’m just not in the mood to do so.

Why did WordPress make this one so difficult? They don’t think they did, but the numbers seem to disagree with them. For the number of fixes that are supposedly contained in the update, it seems to be causing just as many problems for some people who actually got it to upgrade by some fashion. Does that mean their upgrade was invalid, or just that the program was unstable with some downloads? Frankly, I don’t know and I don’t care. I want the protections, but I also want WordPress to officially fix this thing, then tell everyone what’s wrong, instead of us having to run around researching it on various forums and getting conflicting advice. Of course, I say all this with the understanding that the software is free, and that, truthfully, they don’t have to do a single thing to help us out. And this proves why sometimes, with free, you get what you deserve.

Still, I’m holding out hope, so if anyone else had problems loading this thing, and did something that I didn’t mention above to get it working, and it’s working fine, please share.