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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.