Upgrading the software on the Cottage Smallholder site
Posted by Fiona Nevile in Cottage tales | 8 comments
Inca
Last night and early this morning we upgraded the site to the latest version of WordPress. It took a long time and there are still a few glitches that we need to iron out.
We have now installed Bad Behaviour as spam comments and trackbacks are still causing problems. In fact last week the overload of spam hitting the site made it impossible for genuine users to access the site for a total of three hours last week.
We are still experiencing a bumpy ride with the site. Many apologies if it was down when you tried to access it today. Hopefully everything will be up and running smoothly again soon.
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Keep going – all sounds very technical
(mops brow) Glad it all got sorted in the end!
BTW, do you know about the auto-upgrade plugin? I was sceptical, but I used it yesterday to upgrade to the latest version, and it went very smoothly; it downloads the latest version and steps you through the upgrade. It even takes backups so that if it all goes pear-shaped you can get back to where you were easily. I disabled the plugin when I was done, in case it interfered with anything else, but I can just re-enable it next time I upgrade.
Danny you’ve completely lost me – I’m just very pleased that all is back to normal.
Well, we think we have finally ironed out all the glitches and added some new features that were not available in our older version.
Thanks for your good wises, Samantha. At least there were no serious wounds on this occasion!
Perish the thought of receiving spam on your cell phone, Eleanor, and having to pay to receive it. That would be highly immoral apart from everything else. I get one or two a month but do not pay for receiving texts.
Thanks for your advice, Veronica. Yes, you are quite right as we discovered that we need both Bad Behaviour as a first line of defense and Akismet to mop up the survivors (spam)!
You are so right about upgrades being troublesome, James. Nothing ever goes completely as the instructions say and there were two or three really hairy moments when I thought I had lost it! The net effect was that we had to upgrade our VS resources because traffic spikes were eating up all available memory (httd events) but the new features in the current ver of WP make it all worthwhile.
Well done on the upgrade – inevitably when you upgrade it, it will break some things – especially any third party plugins… But you seem to have got it sorted now.
Hope it all works out ok – good luck
I’m glad you’ve upgraded; there were a number of known security issues with earlier versions, and it really pays to keep up to date.
I do recommend using Bad Behaviour along with AKismet; it certainly seems to keep spam on my site to a manageable level, and one of them on its own doesn’t seem to be enough.
Oh, good luck with the upgrade! I had been a bit worried that you were having issues last night when I was clicking about and the site wasn’t up. Glad to know that it was planned!
I also hope you get the spam under control – that sort of thing is never fun. I’ve started getting strange advertising messages on my cell phone of all things! I still don’t know how they got my number, but I am endlessly grateful that I have no restrictions on how many messages can be sent or received during a pay period. Paying to receive spam would be miserable.