Upgrade to 4.1 – or plugins! – completely broke site (from 4.0)

Hi David,

First and foremost, I would suggest ruling out any kind of 3rd party integration issues. That said, I would highly suggest deactivating ALL your plugins as well as switching back to the default WordPress theme (e.g., Twenty Fifteen).

If, by the way, you cannot log in to WordPress to accomplish the above then the following instructions should get you where you want to go:

Steps to revert back to default theme:
1. Via FTP, change the name of your current theme’s folder to something different
2. Log in to your site (e.g., https://www.mysite.com/wp-admin)
3. Go to Appearance > Themes
–> the system will report “The active theme is broken. Reverting to the default theme.”

And that’s it. As stated, you’ve been reverted to the default theme.

Steps to deactivate all plugins:
1. Via FTP, change the name of your plugin’s folder to something different
2. Log in to your site (e.g., https://www.mysite.com/wp-admin)
3. Go to Plugins > Installed Plugins
–> the system will report, for each plugin that was deactivated, “The plugin [plugin name] has been deactivated due to an error: Plugin file does not exist.”

And that’s it. Now all your plugins have been deactivated.

Of course, once you gain access to the site, you’ll want to rename the theme and plugins folders back to what they were. Then, you’ll want to reactivate the theme and plugins. But, reactivate the theme first, then test to see if the issue returns. If not, reactivate one plugin at a time, testing after each activation, until the issue returns. Then deactivate all plugins except for the last one activated and switch back to the default theme and test again. With the goal of reproducing the issue with a default WordPress install and just the one suspect plugin or possibly theme.

Once the culprit theme and/or plugin(s) have been determined, then it’s just a simple matter of reporting your case on the author(s) support site(s).

Hope this helps!

Randy

P.S., Given the error message you’ve stated, it looks like the issue has something to do with your BackUpWordPress plugin. That said, I would highly suggest seeking help over at their support forum:

https://www.ads-software.com/support/plugin/backupwordpress

Have a GREAT weekend!

P.P.S., To just deactivate one suspect plugin, in order to get quickly un-wedged, via FTP navigate to your wp-content/plugins folder and simply change the name of your misbehaving plugin’s folder (e.g., change backupwordpress to backupwordpress-off) .

And that should do the trick!

Randy – thanks very much for the tips on how to repair it via FTP! (I’ll report back if I have more trouble.)

Randy – I’m back in business, thanks again for your help!

FYI – the problem was possibly caused by doing a bulk upgrade of several plugins, including backupwordpress, in a situation where the upgrade of backupwordpress failed because I wasn’t running a new enough PHP. (Actually, I was, but a configuration error had it reporting as 5.2 not 5.4.) That’s just a guess, though. But coincidence or not, from now on I upgrade my plugins one at a time, so I can see the error messages.

Hi David,

This is GREAT news and you’re very welcome!

I totally agree with your idea to, in the future, update one item at a time in order to catch something you might not catch if you did the process in bulk. As for PHP reporting the wrong version, that’s wild!

P.S., Do be sure to mark this thread “resolved” using the dropdown in the sidebar. It saves other volunteers from looking into questions that have already been answered. ??

Sincerely,

Randy

Hi there,
I experienced the same problem than davidbak (and also did a bulk upgrade of several plugins including backupwordpress …) therefore I simply followed the instructions of Randy Sandberg (post Nr 4) and it worked just fine ! So thank you Randy and davidbak for you saved me so much time and energy :-))

You’re very welcome En 1 mot. ??