Who hasn’t run into a WordPress or plugin update issue from time to time? Thankfully with a bit of patience and some good problem solving skills you will be on your way to having your site fixed in no time.
I ran into a bit of trouble with the WordPress upgrade to 4.7 this week and thought I would share my struggles in case others are also facing this issue. On Tuesday I ran a WordPress update on a small non-profit camp website for a client. The front end of the website worked perfectly however when I tried to access the back-end I got a 500 Error that showed wp-admin/upgrade.php?_wp_http_referer=%2Fwp-admin%2F in the url.
My first reaction was to call the hosting company and have them reset the website back to the previous day. (This site is hosted on a great local hosting platform where they are happy to do this for me) They kindly reset the website to the previous day, however this did not fix the website. Yikes!
My next step was to talk to a development company that we use to help when I can’t figure things out. I reached out and got a few suggestions on how to add a debug file to see if that would help to pin-point the error. This was really no help either.
My next step was to go to the WordPress forum and search for help. Here is what I found. Apparently if you use the W3C total cache plugin it causes this error with the update. The first step is to go into your files via ftp and change your plugins folder name to plugins-old. Then you also need to change the names on advanced-cache.php, db.php, object-cache.php, w3-total-cache-config.php. I couldn’t find the config file so I didn’t change this one and it still worked. Once you change these file names you will be brought to a screen that says update database, click on this and you should be good to go. Once this has been completed you will need to go back in via ftp and rename all files that you changed. You may want to make sure all plugins are also up to date at this time. I ran into an issue with one of them not working properly after this.
Thanks to the WordPress forum for helping all of us WordPress geeks out there. It is great to know that someone has your back when an issue does occur.
Happy Updating
