2.8 is evil

Almost all problems with the 2.8 upgrade have been a result of plugins, themes, and lack of memory allocated to PHP.

If you have backups, restore those backups.

If necessary follow the Upgrading WordPress procedures to upgrade your blogs.

It wiped my website completely and it wiped 3 more website hosted on my server.

No it didn’t…if your sites were there and you properly upgraded, you may have problems and you may not be able to see your content until the problems are cleared, but it didn’t “wipe” your sites.

Actually.. it may as well have wiped mine. It blew up halfway in the middle of the install and left countless orphans in my database.

However.. I blame my host. I got a timeout error in the middle and I believe they don’t allocate the proper memory to their servers at times and that causes things like this. Easy to fix though.. blew my database away, created another.. did the install fresh.. uploaded old content. Voila.

However.. I blame my host.

Yes…as you properly point out…that’s not a 2.8 issue…that’s a host issue. Personally, I would look for another host if this is a common occurrence.

I don’t know about “evil” but quirky, for sure.

Odd things don’t function: preview doesn’t work; I can load an image, but not resize it once it’s been loaded; peculiar formatting appears in the text that has to be stripped out ….

Being a user (a content-type person and not a coder) I think I’ll sit back–take the weekend off–and watch the forums for a while before I try to do anything more on my Web site.

I can confirm a “wiping out” of a Website by the 2.8 auto-upgrade, and I find it hard to believe that it can be blamed on “plugins, themes, and lack of memory allocated to PHP.”

Here’s what my experience was:

1. I initiated the auto-update (from 2.7.1 to 2.8) on a WP installation in this directory (not the document root):

/srv/www/htdocs/jbutler/tvstylebook

2. The update stalled at the “installing files” point.

3. All files in the following sub-directories of the document root (/srv/www/htdocs) were deleted:

drwxr-xr-x+ 2 wwwrun www 6 Jun 11 16:36 gallery2
drwxrwxr-x+ 2 jbutler www 6 Jun 11 16:37 aspapodcast
drwxr-xr-x 2 wwwrun www 6 Jun 11 16:37 wp-admin
drwxr-xr-x+ 2 wwwrun www 6 Jun 11 16:37 screenlex
drwxr-xr-x+ 2 wwwrun www 6 Jun 11 16:37 screenpedia
drwxr-xr-x+ 2 wwwrun www 6 Jun 11 16:37 slgallery
drwxr-xr-x+ 2 wwwrun www 6 Jun 11 16:37 ssitejoomla
drwxr-xr-x+ 2 wwwrun www 6 Jun 11 16:37 tcfgallery
drwxr-xr-x+ 2 wwwrun www 6 Jun 11 16:37 tvcritgallery
drwxr-xr-x+ 2 wwwrun www 6 Jun 11 16:37 vsc
drwxr-xr-x 2 wwwrun www 6 Jun 11 16:37 wpmu
drwxr-xr-x 3 wwwrun www 19 Jun 11 16:37 wp-content
drwxr-xr-x 2 wwwrun www 6 Jun 11 16:37 wp-includes

As you can see, most of those directories have nothing to do with this particular WP installation, but they were all deleted at 16:36 to 16:37. In short, any directory with a MySQL connection was targeted! A Joomla installation, a MediaWiki installation, and so on…

Could this rampant destruction be due to a theme or a plug-in? If so, then it seems to me that the auto-upgrade system needs to install some significant safeguards immediately.

I should note that I am using the Atahualpa 3.3.2 theme and that I did NOT de-activate plug-ins. The plug-ins I have installed are:

Akismet 2.2.4
Contact Form 7 1.10.0.1
DM Albums 1.9.1
Exec-PHP 4.9
Flexible Navigation 0.09
GD Pages Navigator 3.8.1
GLM’s Category Magic Plugin 0.9.1
NextGEN Gallery 1.3.3
Random Image Widget 1.5
Really Simple CAPTCHA 1.0
WP-reCAPTCHA

I’ve already posted some of this here:

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/279130?replies=1

There have been no response to that forum topic.

I do NOT feel that WordPress 2.8 is evil. I have been a strong advocate of WP and have created 5 or 6 sites with it, but I was severely disappointed by the destructive power of this upgrade. If I didn’t have a full-system back-up to rely on I would have been totally screwed.

If it’s not a 2.8 issue it is definetly a 2.7.1 issue that i hope is not continued in 2.8. The websites are wiped, be sure of that. The database is ok. I don’t have complete backups and I did do some modifications to the template through the web editor. The database is ok, though. But no plugins should affect a upgrade. Seriously, why would you allow such a design ? Yes, it won’t have perfect OOP, with no duplicate code but this situation wouldn’t happen. It’s also important to have some real data safety. And I can’t imagine what plugin can delete in cascade everything.

I don’t care if it’s a plugins thing or a theme thing, each time there’s an upgrade we should all have to deal with so many problems. The experience should be one where we upgrade and go on with our life without having to take so much time to make it work.

2.8 isn’t evil, but it sure has made my life miserable since upgrading. It shouldn’t be like this.

Next update, it might be wiser for users with lots of plugin installed, to read and follow Upgrading WordPress instead of doing the automatic upgrade.

I’m not yet convinced that WP is deleting other source code, but if it is, then I don’t think it matters for future upgrades whether you have “lots of plugins” or just one plugin…if you have “the” plugin, or one of the plugins that causes this problem, then you’ve got a big problem.

It might be wise from you not to offer the automatic upgrade. Last time it worked fine. Or try making that kind of upgrade safe. But instead you use the same functions that are affected by plugins. At least add one transmitting boolean variablefor the downloading, unpacking, deleting, moving, etc in order not to ask plugins are asked if they have something to say during its steps. Plugins musn’t be allowed to affect everything.

This thread and my own past experiences with upgrading with the first and fresh release of the upgrade is exactly why I’m going to wait until 2.8.1+ before I even think about it. I’ve learned my lesson!

Oh When, oh when is 2.8.1 going to come out?

just waiting for 2.8.1 – 2.7.1 back to me…

The 2.8 upgrade firstly wiped my themes. I restored the backups and went back to 2.7.
I made a few changes to my file structure and tried the 2.8 upgrade again, taking all appropriate action such as deactivating all plugins.
2.8 upgraded and my home page looked fine, but every other page showed up as raw text.
I restored the backups again, but somehow the pages were still corrupt. I looked into the files and about 10 new .php files had been added which weren’t there before. All of my html tags, head tags and body tags were missing.
I could not fix it, no matter what i did. I tried restoring the backups again but somehow my original backups of the theme was still broken.
I ended up upgrading to 2.8 and rebuilding my whole site.
Very annoying process.