paulaeisenberg

I have that plugin too. It seems to work well. Thanks for cleaning up my mess in the first post.

Since then, I found the site was hacked. Details coming….I’ve got a boffo team of WP gurus working on it, one of whom saw this thread and got in touch with me, and turned out to be a very competent hack-fixer. Apparently this happened in July when I was still using 2.7.1, and just now showed up. I need to learn more about how to harden my sites against attacks.

Thank you, Otto. Good suggestions. Can you also remove the path part of that post? That was dumb of me.

I finally got it all working again, by being more patient. I did a database backup, saved that to my hard drive (24.1MB), saved all the WP 2.7.1 files and wp-content files, copied all the widget PHP code and even the Widget Logic code for those that need it, disabled all the plugins (that’s a wretched feeling!), and did the automatic upgrade. I was told by a new friend today NEVER to do it the automatic way, but it worked for me today. I followed the directions on this page: https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Upgrading_WordPress_Extended to the letter.

After that seemed to be working, I activated each plugin, one at a time, checking to see each was working on the front page as well as in admin. Some of the widget code didn’t survive, for some reason, so I was glad I had made copies. It wasn’t hard to rebuild those widgets (I have a lot of lists of old archived articles from pre-Wordpress days that have to show up only on certain category pages, so I use PHP code and Widget Logic for those). The site is pretty complex, because we’re trying to force WordPress to be a CMS, and we’re pushing the envelope a bit.

A side benefit was that as I went through the plugins, I found a few I’m not really using anymore, so I cleaned them out of there. Am I the only one here who goes a little plugin-nuts now and then? It’s like having a free pass in a candy store!

All in all, this time things went pretty smoothly. Thanks to all here (and Cathy, who took pity on me and emailed me last night with suggestions).

OK, Esmi, I’ll try again using your methods.

Otto, maybe you’d better remove my URL, if you’d be so kind.

Otto, I know, and I was trying to upgrade like a good little WP person, but this has been a nightmare.

Esmi, I moved that plugin and several others that were causing error messages into another folder. The site came back up. I’ve been rebuilding everything, including widgets that rely on the sponsors slideshow plugin. I’ve reverted to the older version of the plugin as well as going back to WP 2.7.1.

Obviously, there is something I’m doing wrong, even though I thought I had followed all of the pre-upgrade instructions. I will try again, although I might wait until I have some help from the fellow who did some customization of the theme for me. I have a feeling there are some conflicts there.

I had the same problem, and the same fix worked.

My question, though, is why did this happen? I had not changed the WP version (2.7.1) or the theme (Atahualpa 3.2), and had no new plugins. Why did this “break” all of a sudden?

Otto42, some people are having trouble with the upgrade, including the first couple of posters in this thread. I have no idea if it’s the installer causing the problems, or maybe just conflicts with existing plugins or older themes.

That makes me wonder if there is an easy way to know if a given theme will work with an upgrade of WP.

Cali, I’m in awe of your history. I hope I can help a little. I’m self-taught in all this, having learned HTML from looking at page source code back when Tim Berners-Lee was a pup. WordPress seems marvelous to me, and I’m sad that upgrading seems to be so difficult.

I’ve done 2 successful upgrades from 2.7.1 to 2.8.

First, I backed up everything in wp-content. That’s either in your root, if that’s where you have WordPress installed, or in whatever directory you put WP in. Here are some screencaps of the root and what’s inside wp-content.

Then I ran the automatic upgrade, and it all worked out. If I had had the problem others mentioned about the site not showing up at all, I think I would have just re-uploaded the theme I was using to the wp-content/themes directory. From what I can see, 2.8 doesn’t put things like themes or plugins anyplace different from 2.7.1.

I hope this helps. And thank you for all your visionary work at Microsoft. I’ve starting using a Mac recently, but I’ve always appreciated how MS brought computing to the masses and paved the way for the web.

Gmail is my default email program. When I click on the email icon, Gmail does open, but the link is not inserted into the email message body nor is anything put in the subject line.

Thank you, everyone. I’ll look into the suggestions. To answer Alanft, there are thousands of pages, in 15 or 16 categories. We publish weekly and have been since May, 2002, so we have a lot of articles! Most of them have photos too.

A related question would be, “How best to include searching of the legacy content, if I can’t actually bring the old stuff into the WordPress format?” Now, we use Google site search.

https://www.larchmontgazette.com

Yes, that helped, thank you! The easiest thing was to just deactivate the Flexible Upload plugin.

You’re the best!