Wendy Cholbi

Technology-to-English Translator

Upgrading: The zeroth step

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WordPress Updates: What to do first?

If you haven’t been inside your WordPress dashboard for awhile, you may be confronted with multiple update notices when you log in. You probably have a handful of plugins that need updating, and perhaps your theme has come out with a new version (yep, that’s an affiliate link, since I use and recommend that theme), and WordPress itself might need updating.

WordPress is famous for its easy one-click updates, so even if all three of these things need attention, you can probably do them pretty quickly, probably within minutes.

So which part should you update first? The plugins, WordPress software, or your theme? What’s the first step?

Backup backup backup

The best answer is actually “none of the above.”

Before you update, especially if you have multiple updates, you should back up your site.

The backup step is so important, it should come before the first step. It’s the zeroth step (hat tip to Asimov’s Laws of Robotics here).

Which means that backing up needs to be easy and quick. So easy and quick that you can do it in one or two clicks and know you have the ability to restore your site just as easily. “Drat, I have to make a backup first” should not be a barrier to updating.

BackupBuddy to the rescue

My favorite backup method is a premium WordPress plugin called BackupBuddy. It’s not free, but the support forum and documentation are extensive and helpful, and I now use this plugin for all my own sites, all my new client sites, and all my Website Tune-Up and Peace of Mind Program clients.

I’ve used it to migrate (move) WordPress sites from one host to another, and from testing sites to launch. Once it’s installed, it really is one-click easy to run a backup (zero clicks if you set up automatic scheduling, which I highly recommend).

The makers of BackupBuddy have created a free 28-page PDF guide to using the plugin, available for download without even giving them your email address. Take a look if you’re thinking of buying the plugin, then if you do decide to purchase, use the special promo code RESCUE30 to save 30% during the month of March 2012 only.

What about that update order?

Once you’ve got your backups created and safely stored in case you need to roll back your site, you are cleared for updating. If you need to update multiple parts of your site, think about it in order from large to small.

When you update multiple pieces of your site, be sure to do it in this order:

  1. WordPress (the biggest most important piece, because it runs your whole site)
  2. Your theme (gives your entire site its look and feel)
  3. Plugins (smaller pieces that affect particular site functions)

If you update a plugin before update WordPress, and that plugin requires a later version of WordPress, you could end up breaking your site (or at the very least, losing the plugin’s functionality). Same with themes.

I’ve seen both things happen, and fortunately with BackupBuddy and FTP access, I’ve been able to fix things up pretty quickly, but it’s easier to just avoid breaking them in the first place.

So make a backup first, and stick to a safe update order. And may you never need your backups!

Feeling a little out of tune?

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Tuning a Bass Guitar by Martin Howard

Perhaps you haven’t updated WordPress in awhile.

Maybe you’ve even “tuned out” the pink bar at the top of the screen that politely yet firmly tells you to Please update now!

And you’re avoiding the little circle-with-a-number in your sidebar that keeps insistently telling you that an ever-larger number of plugins have new versions available.

You may have even read my instructions for updating WordPress, or watched my video tutorial on updating WordPress, and you’ve told yourself, “this looks easy, maybe I should take care of this.”

Yet you hold off on pressing that “Update” button. You’re not 100% confident that it will go smoothly.

Perhaps you’ve heard tales of upgrades gone bad…and even attempts to be reassuring, like my post But what if your WordPress upgrade fails?, lead you to wonder…what else could go wrong?

Hey, you’re not alone. Even rockstars sometimes get out of tune or break a guitar string (I suspect that breaking a guitar string happens all the time to the pros, in fact I’ve seen it happen on stage).

The thing is, expert musicians have the skills and tools to take care of events like the broken string. With the spare strings on hand, and basic guitar knowledge (or, you know, a crew of seasoned roadies), it’s but a moment’s work to restring, tune, and be ready to strum again.

Introducing the Website Tune-Up

When it comes to your WordPress website, things can get slow and out-of-tune if you haven’t upgraded in awhile, plus you’re more vulnerable to Internet Bad Guys if you’re using older code. And if you don’t have a backup system that automatically creates regular backups for you, it’s much harder to restore your site if something does happen to it.

I don’t want bad stuff to happen to your site, whether the cause is Internet Bad Guys or Upgrades Gone Wrong or merely a code-tweak with unforeseen consequences. I am intimately familiar with that last one, being a die-hard code-tweaker…I learned the hard way to always do a pre-tweak backup!

So I created the Website Tune-Up, a service in which I backup and upgrade everything for you. It makes you safer on two levels:

  1. You’re updated to the latest, greatest code, so you’re less vulnerable to crashes and hacks, and
  2. You have a dependable backup that happens automagically, so if something were to mess with your site, you could be up and running again with a quick restore.

“Trust me, I know what I’m doing.” With apologies to Sledge Hammer fans everywhere.

The Website Tune-Up grew out of my standard list of things I do for pretty much every web client I work with, the first time I log into their WordPress dashboard.

It starts with a full backup, because I never make changes to a client’s site without a safety net.

Often, doing a backup means installing and configuring a backup plugin.

After the backup is made, everything gets upgraded to the latest and greatest. This means WordPress itself first, then plugins, then the theme if there’s a new version.

I’ll check various important settings (things like permalinks, media library folders, and discussion settings that reduce comment spam).

I also run a quick check for malware and server malfunctions, and often I end up optimizing the WordPress database to speed things up and save space.

Almost every time I do this, I notice things that could be improved — a plugin that does the job of two, or a setting that is slowing things down. These are things that are easy for me to spot and tweak, but they may never have occurred to the site owner.

WordPress Peace of Mind

If you’re ready to get upgraded to the latest and greatest, hop on over to the Website Tune-Up page.

One small detail: The Website Tune-Up actually includes a full month of upgrades, for anything that gets updated after your Tune-Up is completed. If you want ongoing upgrades by Yours Truly, you can sign up for the ongoing Peace of Mind Program for a monthly fee after your Tune-Up month has passed (but don’t worry, you’re not being automatically signed up for a monthly program that you’ll have to cancel to get out of the monthly fee — I’ll never pull a trick like that!).

WordPress 3.3 is in its final beta-testing stage, so that pink Please update now! message may be popping up on your screen sometime in November. If you want to spare yourself the dread of upgrading when the next version of WordPress is released, let me handle your upgrades and backups for you.

Get a Website Tune-Up today!

“Bass guitar tune” image adapted from Martin Howard on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.

But what if your WordPress upgrade fails?

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Here’s a quick way to fix one of the most common errors when upgrading WordPress — plus reassurance that it’s not your fault.

Let’s say you follow my advice to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress.

You log into your WordPress dashboard and click “Please update now” in the little message at the top of your screen. Then, on the next screen, since you’re all backed up (you are, aren’t you?), you click “update automatically.”

And then the unthinkable happens: Your website disappears.

All you see is a white screen, blank except for this bland, non-reassuring message:

Say what?!?

At this point you might follow the instructions and wait a minute, but probably not. A more likely scenario is that, in an adrenaline surge of anxiety, you hit the refresh button on your browser, even though you’re worried about messing up an upgrade in progress. You might even refresh a couple of times in a row. And at some point you get this even more frightening message in the middle of your still-ominously-blank screen:

And what’s worse, there is no “OK” button to click, nor is there a “cancel” button, nor is there a Panic Button.

So, naturally, you panic.

You try to load your website — any page on your website. And you get nowhere. Then you try to reload the login page, and your anxiety levels ramp up to DefCon 1 Red Alert Battle Stations when you realize that you can’t even login to the back end of your site.

At least that’s what happened to me the first time I saw this message after a “routine” WordPress upgrade.

How to fix the “Scheduled Maintenance” error

First of all, it’s not your fault. You didn’t break anything. It’s a weird little WordPress glitch that happens to me about one in every eight upgrades (and I do quite a bit of upgrading for my various sites plus my Peace of Mind Program clients).

Second of all, there is a way you can fix it. Yourself.

You’ll need to access your website files via FTP. If you are not familiar with this process, I suggest you log into your web hosting account and look in their help section for information about FTP. Your web host may have even emailed you FTP instructions when you first signed up for web hosting.

You’ll need a piece of software called an FTP client, which is different from a web browser. You can get a free FTP client called FileZilla here if you don’t have one installed on your computer.

To login to your website, you’ll need three pieces of information:

  1. A hostname. Sometimes this is ftp.your-domain.com, but sometimes it’s a server address at your web host. This is why you need to read your web host’s specific instructions.
  2. A username. Sometimes your web host assigns you one, sometimes you have to set this up yourself.
  3. A password. Even if your web host assigns your password, you can usually change it in your web hosting account. Please take care to use a solid, secure password here, because this is a direct doorway to all of your website files.

When you login to the FTP server for your website, you’ll be looking at a list of files. Look for a file named .maintenance, a file that was created today. Whether your files are sorted alphabetically or by creation date, it should appear near the top. You may have to change your FTP client’s preferences so that you can see files whose names begin with a dot (period).

On my FTP client (Fetch, which is Mac-only and not free — but when it’s transferring a file, the cursor changes into an animated running puppy, which feature all by itself is well worth the price of the software), it looks like this:

Found that file? Good. Now delete it.

Yep, just delete it.

Now go back to your web browser and try your site URL.

Don’t reload the page with the error message, the one that has a URL that looks like this:

http://your-domain.com/wp-admin/update-core.php?action=do-core-upgrade.

You’ll just get that ominous “are you sure you want to do this?” error message again.

Instead, just reload the front page of your site.

If your site reappears, you are good! You have solved the problem! Go ahead and login to your dashboard and breathe a sigh of relief.

And that’s how to fix the “scheduled maintenance” error that sometimes happens when upgrading WordPress. If you get a different error message, or a totally blank screen with no error message at all, this fix will most likely not work. But those situations are much more rare.

My very favorite thing about WordPress 3.1

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Chain link image by John-Morgan

Yesterday I told you all about the WordPress admin bar, my second-favorite feature of the latest release. Today I’ll tell you about my very favorite feature of WordPress 3.1 — the thing that made me bounce delightedly and exclaim “holy shit I love this!”

Yes, I really did say that. Out loud.

(WordPress 3.1 was released in late February, and if you haven’t already upgraded, please do! If you need some help, watch my video tutorial on upgrading WordPress, or follow my illustrated instructions.)

Ready to feel the power?

Follow the links

It’s the “add link” dialog box!

How can anyone get this excited about a dialog box?

Well, consider that in the Olden Days of last month, linking to one of my own blog posts was a complex multi-step process.

Let’s say I was writing a blog post (like this one) and I wanted to link to another of my blog posts (like I did in the first line, where I linked to yesterday’s post).

I would have to get the full URL of that post, which normally would mean opening another tab showing my site, navigating to the post I wanted, and copying the address from the browser bar. Only then could I click the little chain-link icon in my editing screen, which would open the “add link” dialog box where I could paste the address I’d just copied.

And I did this frequently, because if I’ve written about related topics before, it’s a service to my newer readers to let them know about it. Plus cross-linking to your own stuff is a good practice for search engine optimization (though not as important as having outside sites link to you).

But WordPress has now made the “add link” dialog box into an internal linking powerhouse!

In your editing screen, when you highlight some text (or an image) you want to turn into a link, and then click on the little chain-link icon, this dialog box pops up:

The "add link" dialog box, showing all the pages and posts on your site

You can still type or paste a URL directly into the top field, optionally add a title, and your link is good to go. There’s still a handy checkbox to specify whether you want the link to open in a new window or in the same window (that topic deserves a whole post of its own…).

But look out below! Beneath “Or link to existing content” (you might have to click the gray triangle) there’s a list of every post and page on your website!

Linking to your own content just got super-duper easy:

  • If you want to link to a recent post, it will be right there on top, because the list is organized in order of publication.
  • If you know when you published the post or page, you can scroll directly to that date to find it.
  • Or you can search your site, right from within the dialog box, to instantly find the exact post or page you want.

When you locate the post or page you want to link to, click it and the URL and Title fields will be automagically filled in:

After searching for a post, clicking on the post title fills in the URL and title fields

Of course you’re free to edit the link title (this is what shows up when you hover over the link with your cursor — as distinct from the anchor text, which is the clickable link text itself — the piece of text you highlighted before clicking the “add link” button).

And that’s that! It’s now a one-step easy process to find and link to any post or page on your website, right from within the “add link” dialog box!

Update: I’ve added a tutorial on adding jump links that point to locations within a post (or page).