Re: Warning for IBM i WordPress Users

Comments in-line Richard

On Aug 21, 2015, at 12:27 AM, Richard Schoen <Richard.Schoen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

More important question is did you get to the root cause of the update issue and did you have adequate backups ?

Not yet - we are still working on it. But yes - full database backup every night and full WP system backup weekly.

How many times did you ignore the plugin issue ?

We didn’t. We’ve been trying to fix it for a couple of months. Every time we were notified of an update we checked if the issue was relevant to us and if it was we performed a manual update. But the plug-ins weren’t the problem in the end - it was WP “lying” about the main updates that caused the problems.

That's one reason I don't like auto-updates.

I can understand that. I have to admit that I have never been more disappointed by a piece of OS software as I have been by WP. The underlying database is awful (I’m not sure it even deserves that complimentary a term) and the fact that the recommended update process (automatic) informs you that the system has been updated when it hasn’t is worrying. Previously we had used the blogging module of Drupal and I was persuaded to switch because of the many plug-ins for WP that would enable us to do things that were going to require custom coding in Drupal. Big mistake - should have stuck with what we have but it is too late to go back now.

Would be useful if you document this for others if you learn more on the cause.

Absolutely.

I've always run Wordpress on Windows or Linux.

Not an option for the reasons I explained earlier. More to the point - there is zero reason it shouldn’t work every bit as well on IBM i.

Regards,

Richard Schoen | Director of Document Management Technologies, HelpSystems
T: + 1 952-486-6802
RJS Software Systems | A Division of HelpSystems
richard.schoen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
www.rjssoftware.com
Visit me on: Twitter | LinkedIn

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message: 2
date: Thu, 20 Aug 2015 19:13:32 -0400
from: Jon Paris <jon.paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
subject: [WEB400] Warning for IBM i WordPress Users

For some time now we have been wrestling with trying to find out why our WP site was automatically updating itself, but that all plug-ins failed during the last step of the update for no obvious reason.

We have spent many hours and $s on this without resolution and have had to resort to manually updating the plug-ins.

Why am I mentioning this? Because after the last round of updates a number of features on the site stopped working. Password resets, blog post notifications, etc. It turns out that the WP update process has been ?lying? to us - the main wP software was no actually being updated it just said it was. As a result we appear to be in a situation where the plug-ins are for a more recent version of WP than the one we were actually running! The net appears to have been that various functions failed.

We have now manually updated the main WP software and most of the ?broken? functionality is working again - not all of it and we suspect that database corruption during the mis-match period may have caused this - we?re still working on it.

So - this is just a heads up to any of you using WP that you may not be as up-to-date as you think! And that may lead to other problems later.


Jon Paris

www.partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com


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Jon Paris

www.partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com