Cyanara

Sadly, none of the plugins or adding code to functions.php seems to have had any effect. I added a wp-cron hourly schedule through my Cpanel after seeing it mentioned in the WP blog entry from when automatic updates were released. The complete absence of WordPress noticing any problem with its inaction suggested the problem may lie with that, but adding a wp-cron schedule on its own hasn’t changed anything. I don’t know if I need to create something on the WordPress side to help it trigger.

Have you had any luck, hansenberg? This is a frustrating problem for me too and none of the plugin solutions seem to be doing anything.

It only happens for two sites I manage on a particular hosting server chosen by a client, and everything else is the same as my working sites, so I’m inclined to believe that it’s a hosting issue. However, beyond recreating the database, WP installation, and websites from scratch, and changing the FTP permissions (all of which I did), I’m not sure what else I can do.

PS: You might want to reconsider having your WP FTP permissions set to 777. That opens you up to complete public access, as I understand it, which basically means your site will inevitably be hacked. There are lots of personal thoughts on what permissions to use, but maybe refer to this summary at Stack Overflow

Awesome, mate. Thanks for that. Messing with functions.php rarely ends well for me, so I’m giving the plugin method a go, with a few tweaks like adding plugin updates. Hopefully it works out for everyone.

It seems like the codex page on this matter could stand to be a bit clearer. For the average person, all they are going to see is “put these lines into wp-config.php”. It doesn’t really explicitly mention editing functions.php, let alone how to create a quick plugin. Anyway, we’ll see whether this works by tomorrow.

Well, that didn’t work. I manually added in the WordPress commands into wp-config and that didn’t do anything either, so I have no reason to believe that Advanced Automatic Updates is in any way the issue here. Closing the thread.

Good news! I received an email this morning telling me one of the sites updated last night! I don’t think I changed anything yesterday (except giving both sites a random table prefix again), so it was a little bit delayed, but as far as I can tell, it has one relevant difference over the site that did not. At the end of the wp-config.php file, I inserted this code:

/**Sets up 'direct method for wordpress autoupdate, without FTP */
define('FS_METHOD','direct');

I got the advice from this site, although I was not actually using FTP to update. I haven’t used anything else from that page since changing the FTP permissions broke my whole site.

I can’t say for sure if this is what fixed it, but I’m making the change to the remaining site and will advise if it also updates.

Well, I took the plunge and wiped both sites, creating fresh databases and installing WordPress from scratch. I kept the default wp-content folder name and database table names. One site has the security plugins, but the other site has nothing but some freshly created pages, a modified theme, Advanced Automatic Updates and an outdated Facebook plugin copied to the plugins folder by FTP.

I also copied the Facebook plugin folder to one of my working sites, and it updated it in no time. I also realised that that site had a modified table name that clearly wasn’t causing any problems.

However, the two broken sites simply refuse to automatically run the update. I ran the Background Update Tester and it was perfectly satisfied that everything was fine. I don’t really have anything else to isolate, unless this plugin can actually be affected by customised themes.

My best guess is that the hosting server or CPanel is configured in some way that this plugin just doesn’t like. All my working sites are through a different host that I much prefer, but I have no control over where these ones are hosted. That said, this plugin did work on these sites prior to 20/9/13, going by my email records.

I’m open to any suggestions at this point ?? These sites get attacked way too much to not keep updated.