Unfortunately, it didn’t work.

It never worked.

It didn’t matter what I tried, I still had to do upgrades manually!

As far as I was concerned, this was just how it had to be and there was clearly a bug or a conflict or something in WordPress.  One day, I even went through the process of uninstalling all my plugins just to see if the WordPress upgrade would run.  It didn’t.

So I’d resigned myself to a life of manual upgrades and decided that I’d only upgrade once every few months.  Then I started running some sites on HostGator.

Imagine my surprise when “just for fun”, I tried to run an automatic upgrade for one of my plugins on this new Hostgator hosted blog, AND IT WORKED!  I hastily went through all of the automatic upgrades that were available and EVERY SINGLE ONE WORKED!!!

Hmmmmm…….

Clearly, the problem was with 1&1.  I validated this by testing a number of other blogs hosted on the same platform and sure enough, the problem only ever manifested on 1&1.  When I finally reached the point of helping a friend with their blog which was also hosted on 1&1 (thanks to MY recommendation!) I decided it was time to find a fix.

It turns out that the fix is really easy, once you understand the problem.

Inside the WordPress admin interface, the upgrade processes take quite a bit of memory.  On Hostgator, the defaults for PHP are set high enough that you shouldn’t encounter a problem, but on 1&1 they’re set too low for our needs.  To fix this, all we need to do is to set a higher memory limit, which we do by creating a php.ini file.  This file needs only one line:

memory=32MB

Once you’ve created the file, upload it to your wp-admin directory and you should find that the problem’s been fixed!

Hope this helps!

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Today though, this all changed! 

One of the things that I’d never checked is exactly HOW the process works.  There’s a setting that allows me to select the role that a new subscriber will take:

Imagine my shock then, when I found a new subscriber this morning, with a role of ‘Administrator’!  Of course, I deleted the user (it was clearly a random email address!) and any content that may have been associated with them, and looked at the settings in order to restrict the roles that a new user could take.

There is NO SUCH SETTING! I can find nothing allowing me to restrict the role through the administration interface!  This is not to say that I couldn’t do it through code, but it seems like a major flaw in the design of WordPress!  My only option given the time that I have available today was to remove the option for users to register.

For the time being, if you want to subscribe to my site, please use my RSS feed.  I’ll also be adding a proper RSS feed link on one of the sidebars to make this easier (which I seem to have overlooked…!!!!)

Also, watch out for my newsletter which should be launching soon.  This will be the best way to keep up to date with the news and reviews as it will contain more in-depth articles than I typically include on the blog!  If you’d be potentially interested in reading a newsletter from me, why not leave a comment below and let me know?

In the meantime, protect your WordPress blog!

You know what it’s like with ANY upgrade – I was understandably nervous.  The reality was that it took me longer to back everything up before I started than it did to actually run the upgrade!

If anyone hit the maintenance page that’s been up for about 10 minutes – I apologise and I hope that you made it back in order to see the new site in all it’s glory!

In fact, the site looks just the same as it did before the upgrade on the front page (so the Semiologic theme IS in fact compatible with 2.5) it’s just the admin interface that’s changed drastically – and for the better, it seems!

As I get more familiar with the changes, I may well post some more info.  For now – now that I know that the “posting” function still works – I can deactivate the maintenance page and get the site back up.

Has anyone else had similar experiences with WordPress 2.5, or was it more challenging for you?

Please leave your comments below….

I’m planning to tackle this before the end of the week, so if you visit my blog during this time and it’s down – please come back again!

For my Entrecard advertisers,  I’m intending to put up a holding/maintenance page (maybe even a duplicate site), but if I DO cause any significant downtime, I’ll reimburse the people affected with double the credits that they originally paid me for the ad space.  That’s fair, isn’t it?

Finally, I’ll post an update here when the upgrade’s in place.

Watch this space……

It covers:

• The best blogging techniques.
• How to get traffic to your blog.
• How to turn your blog into money.

I’ll let you know what I think once I’ve had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it’s still free.

Please take the time to check this out yourself and let me know if you think it’s valuable.

I find these regular outages something of a concern when they’re accompanied by no explanation from the provider.  Did the Semiologic software crash the site?  Was it down for maintenance?  Has the author not paid his hosting fees???  Whatever the reason, you have to think carefully about whether you would spend $295 for Semiologic Pro when you can’t be sure how thorough the support will be!

Having said that, in my opinion, it’s a “must have” add-on for any WordPress site!

Yet again, it’s down!  What’s more interesting though, is that the owner’s sales page promoting the Pro version of the theme (at $295!) is still up, suggesting that it’s not a server problem.

Come on Denis – sort your site out!!!

Have a look for yourself at www.semiologic.com.

Is this planned maintenance?  Is there a problem??  Are they even aware of it???

All that I’m seeing is a default WordPress page:

Watch this space – I’ll post a message once it’s live again!