Yesterday was a mess. It was so much of a mess that I needed to write this post so that no one else will go through what I did. Well, they will if they don’t read this post, but maybe I can help some. And yes, I’m talking about WordPress 3.2.

First, this one seemed to come pretty fast since I’m thinking it was only a few weeks ago that we upgraded to 3.1.4, and it was in May that we upgraded to 3.1.3. However, in reality it was a year ago that we moved to 3.0, and I remember that because I had to go through some gesticulations to get my blogs and websites up to PHP 5.0 so it would accept 3.0; ah, the things we remember.

Yesterday morning I saw the message about upgrading to 3.2, and I ignored it because I had other things to do. I figured that I would get to it later in the day, and I did after I’d written a few blog posts I decided to use the automatic upgrade thing that we all have, yet found that it only worked on two of my four blogs; what the hey?

Obviously I had to go research it, because I was getting this error message saying I had run out of memory. That didn’t make sense, but what did make sense is that the two blogs that wouldn’t automatically upgrade were using the same theme, though I’ve modified them so they don’t look the same. And the error message highlighted the same line, so I knew it had to be related to the theme.

What I found didn’t mention the theme, but it did say that anyone that was having the out of memory error message had to load 3.2 manually. That’s not so hard to do, and they always give the same instructions for doing it. However, most of the time I don’t follow the full instructions.

What I’ve always done is just download the new version, then load the software for both the wp-admin and wp-includes over what’s already there. That’s always worked in the past, and then for wp-content I specifically go in and load each new file instead of doing the same thing because that holds all your other stuff, such as pictures, plugins, etc. The entire thing took me 7 minutes total for both blogs; by the way, other than doing the automatic upgrade, any time you’re upgrading your WordPress software always disable your plugins and load them back when you’re done.

Anyway, when I went in to test things a lot of things wouldn’t work. I couldn’t respond to comments. I couldn’t do anything with my plugins. And the admin panel didn’t look right; not like the other two blogs.

This meant I actually had to go through the step by step process of deleting all the files from the two files I mentioned and reload it. With my FTP program, I can’t delete any folders that have files in them; the same thing probably happens to you. So, this process takes awhile, making sure I delete each file within a folder, then deleting these folders one by one and backing back out until I can eventually delete the main folders. I had to do that for both blogs, and reload everything.

At that point you’d think I was done, right? Not quite. One blog came back immediately, and I was a happy guy. The other blog, my business blog; nope. I couldn’t do anything with another new post I was writing. That is, I couldn’t add tags or a category, and I couldn’t post date anything; what the hey? And on that blog I also still couldn’t respond to comments; ugh.

I decided to go through the steps again of deleting everything then reloading the files. I ended up doing it 3 times; nothing. Then something hit me, and I opened another browser and tested things there. What do you know; it was working on another browser.

At this point it seemed that the trick was to empty the cache on the browser I always use, Firefox. I did that, went into the admin panel, and everything was working perfectly. Man, I wish I’d thought to do that up front because I might have had it right after all. Why it didn’t affect both blogs I don’t know, but everything is all right with the world once more.

Also, my research mentioned that there was some extra stuff in 3.2 which also needed more resources, which is why it might not have worked for everyone, but from this point on all other updates should work just fine. I guess we’ll see about that. Anyway, you’ve now been informed and updated and I hope if you have to go the manual route you’ll learn something from this post.