Fatal Errors

Even after downloading WP 4.1 from the WP site https://downloads.www.ads-software.com/release/wordpress-4.1.zip
and re-uploading the files with FTP I was getting the error.

I then opened the file, found the function and just copied that functions.php file to /wp-includes and it now works.

Why the FTP of the file in the whole copy of the new version didn’t work I have no idea but there is obviously an issue with FTP or copying it from the site (letting the site manage the FTP) as the files were not being copied over.

However it has screwed my whole theme up and all my drop down menus are now irrelevant and incorrect. This has been the worst update of them all and a good reason why I have stopped updated WP apart from my own code like the RETRY * 5 on the MySQl Server has gone away error I implemented in my own wp_db.php file some years back which I notice you incorporated into your own file in a different way.

Core features like security or DB features I can understand updates for but API Jizz e.g just making things move around more funky etc is not worth my time. I hate the new way you cannot scroll down the editor without losing the top half of the screen like you could before and some of the other features.

Seems like a lot of people have had similar issues and this has been a nightmare and a half for me.

Which site? Strictly Software or Horse Racing?

Worst update ever

Taken me all day and night to get my site back to how it looked before the update.

Menus screwed
Publicize on Jetpack to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+ not working
Post pages that you cannot scroll down unless you toggle between text and visual (that have swapped positions).
And too many bugs and other issues to mention

Nightmare – Kids Don’t Do Drugs OR Update WordPress!!!

https://www.ukhorseracingtipster.com/ was the site I updated. The other isn’t a WP site. My other WP site I am leaving on WP 3.9.2. I cannot do all this again and I am not even sure it will all work tomorrow when email posts go in, get added as articles and then pushed out to social media sites as they were all doing before I upgraded

What happens when you turn off all plugins and use the default theme?

I never tried that route, but it “seems” to be working now after a day of mares.

I don’t want to start breaking it again and seeing what happens.

New content won’t start flowing in from emails, then to posts, then out to my social media sites until the morning now. I can hardcode those posts tomorrow if I need to as I have been going mad all day and night.

It seems as if for whatever reason the main /wp-includes/functions.php file does not get overwritten with your new functions file when you either FTP from the site or FTP the whole version up – probably due to a page being open by someone so the file being in use and therefore FTP not being able to copy over it??

However a manual copy of that file DID overwrite it after I tried those 2 copy routes. At first I was commenting out functions and so on to get them to work (see the “redefined” error)

Then the menus were all messed up, I hid all the pages/categories that shouldn’t be shown in the menus in the sexy system and then had to change the order of them of all.

At first at the top of the plugins page it said just hit save as it was a “fresh” install of my theme which it obviously wasn’t. However just hitting save didn’t get rid of any bugs.

I have disconnected and re-connected all publicize social options and hopefully that will work as latest posts have not been pushed (even after a re-save to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter etc)

What I don’t get is why the “Visual” and “Text” menu options on the editor have switched round.

Also now when I try and scroll down the page (as there is no scroll bar – [using Chrome / Win8] on the WSIWYG editor) the content in the editor doesn’t scroll down with me. So I have to go into the editor toggle between text and visual again before it will work.

I don’t understand why the scrollbar has gone from the WSIWYG editor as if I want to bold / link something further down the article I cannot see the toolbar when I highlight a word etc. It used to let me scroll inside the editor – then it changed so you had to scroll the whole page – why I don’t know.

It seems to be stable now but it has taken a lot out of me to get right and it seems everytime there is a major update we are pushed into upgrading but it causes major issues.

Thanks for helping but I am going to bed now! Any advice or reasons to these issues I would love to know as it happens every time I upgrade.

Also my own plugins which AutoTags articles (I just had two go on) is not working – this seems to happen EVERY time I upgrade.

This means tweets and Google+/FB don’t go out as it’s linked to my TweetBOT.

If I manually edit the articles they tag and tweet but the auto imported (from feed) articles are not acting the same.

Ideas would be great?

Just manually tried to import some feeds, they went to Twitter but nothing has gone to Tumblr, Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn.

Don’t know if Jetpack is broken but I upgraded the latest version.

Not what I wanted to be doing on a Sunday night

Have you tried:
-deactivating all plugins to see if this resolves the problem. If this works, re-activate the plugins one by one until you find the problematic plugin(s).
-switching to the default theme to rule out any theme-specific problems.

Without being able to rule out your theme and plugins it is not possible to find the error.

Happy Xmas and please, you must have read my profile, I have 5 plugins on here + scripts and multiple articles I have all written (all to attempt to) increase performance or bypass issues due to existing WP plugins OR core code.

The plugin thing was something I always try when all else fails but it was clearly not a plugin/theme issue as none of this code had changed and the errors related to the WP upgrade process not plugins e.g

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare url_is_accessable_via_ssl() (previously declared in /home/mysite/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php:3013) in /home/mysite/public_html/wp-includes/deprecated.php on line 3494

Fatal error: Call to undefined function wp_json_encode() in /home/mysite/public_html/wp-includes/class.wp-scripts.php on line 186

Just for example see my own retry connection * X (times) wp-db.php file that I wrote for WP 3.6 way before 3.9 put it into their core code >> https://blog.strictly-software.com/2013/08/mysql-server-has-gone-away-fix-for.html that I edited from an earlier author, to fix the “MySQL Server Has Gone Away Error” (or more like get round it).

Please excuse any cursing at the beginning of the article that is just because I have looked at the WP core code!

Also I have actually had a happiness engineer confirm to me it is indeed badly written and the only reason they don’t write a new core version whilst keeping the existing one running until a swap can be done is the lack of funds/developers (how true that is I don’t know but it was said 100%), plus I know from my own web development a lot of systems start off small and easy to manage then get too big to redevelop easily etc. So it seems perfectly possible.

I tried all the plugin stuff and didn’t even mention it due to the fact it I thought it was a given.

Same as the IT Crowd (UK TV Show about IT Geeks) saying automatically to any support call “Turn the computer on and off again”.

Being a developer it seems to be the fact that WP needs to manage the update process better.

I first tried the update from the admin panel “please
update to WP 4.1″ etc – this caused the fatal errors due to functions.php not being updated and the missing functions/overwrites etc. Note the dozens/hundreds of similar people with the same error on Google (your forums)

No plugin re-install will fix this core issue.

It seems like WordPress needs to try something like the following during an upgrade:
-hold a cache of files/sizes to be updated for the release
-during their own zip download, unpack and copy, note the file size before and after the copy + dates of the files etc.
-if the files fail to copy or the size/dates don’t change they need to try a number of times to do the same file with a sleep of X seconds inbetween.
-If after X tries the file cannot be copied over with the new file replacing the old one a restore needs to be done.

I noticed the admin update took a hundredth of the time the full FTP update of the code took. Even that failed. So a copy issue seems to be the likely culprit.

It seems like functions.php is the file causing the problem. Whether it is being used by Apache and cannot be copied over due to locks (same issue we have in IIS with FTP and files in use) I don’t know but it seems likely so a retry for X times with a wait inbetween whilst existing connections are all killed except the one being used might be a good idea.

This was the first thing that went wrong.

Nothing to do with plugins.

It was due to the functions file failing, You can search the forums and find hundreds of similiar people with the same issues.

So I don’t think it was a plugin / theme issue (none of these changed – only core WP code did) – as all errors pointed to the functions file e.g

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare url_is_accessable_via_ssl() (previously declared in /home/mysite/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php:3013) in /home/mysite/public_html/wp-includes/deprecated.php on line 3494

Fatal error: Call to undefined function wp_json_encode() in /home/mysite/public_html/wp-includes/class.wp-scripts.php on line 186

However to fix the plugin issues I didn’t have to re-activate any of them I had to re-save the settings. Why this fixed it I have no idea. In Jetpack I had to diconnect and re-connect ALL my social media sites to get that working again NOT de-activate / re-activate it.

For the rest of the plugins I had to actually just “use them” or “save them”.

Why I don’t know.

Maybe a developer could help with this but maybe your plugins are stored in memory and the upgrade effects this memory so a flush is required and only a re-save makes this occur?

I am just throwing ideas out here so please take no offence.

1 problem I still have is the Jetpack stats not working (I suspect) due to a conflict in ISAPI rewrite rules as when I go to

https://www.ukhorseracingtipster.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=stats

I get my WP-O-Matic dashboard with the stats of campaigns NOT the Jetpack stats page. How I can resolve this I have no idea. No upgrades of either has ever solved it.

Also it seems when I edit existing posts the editor is screwed. I have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page then back up again to get the editor to scroll to the top and bottom otherwise I just see a snippet from the middle. Sometimes the visual version won’t load just the text version. Toggling does nothing.

Everything else is fixed now due to the steps I outlined above.

The issue is…how can WordPress stop this from happening everytime they have a future update??

Updated to 4.1 now my scroll bar for editing is gone. How do I get it back????? HELP

@lmurphy15
If you need help, start your own thread.

Why tell people to start your own thread. If they have the same problems surely it’s best to have one thread with the issues on it and the solution (if we ever get one) on it as well.

I still don’t have a scroll bar in my Editor either. So both of us have the same issue since moving to 4.1