Question Any wordpress guru's in the house?

[sim667]

My friend is having a situation with her blog where she's not able to update wordpress, but there's new plugins she would like to install that aren't compatible with the older version she's currently using.

She's been told that there's something in her config.php thats stopping the update, but I've had a look and I can't see exactly what would be doing that (although, my experience with wordpress is very limited and out of date).

Is anyone able to suggest what parameters in the config.php I might be finding the issue with?

 

[Lazy Llama]

Bit tricky to say without more information.

Is there an actual error message?

WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE set to false would prevent autoupdates, but that's obvious enough that you would have spotted it, and wouldn't affect manual updates.

 

[sim667]

Bit tricky to say without more information.

Is there an actual error message?

WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE set to false would prevent autoupdates, but that's obvious enough that you would have spotted it, and wouldn't affect manual updates.

She said she set it to true, but it didn't update.

However I also noted that she's using old versions of MySQL and PHP, which may mean its not update due to prereq tests...... I've told her to try taking a backup of her site as it is, and setting up a second site to test with so her main site doesn't end up going down.

She hasn't sent me any error messages, but I'll ask.

 

[Lazy Llama]

Probably the old versions of MySQL and PHP, I know a lot of hosts are slow updating them.
That's also one of things I need to do on the Urban75 server.

 

[sim667]

It just tells her she's got the latest version of wordpress (its 4.something).

 

[sim667]

All of her logs look super old, june 2018 too.

 

[RoyReed]

What version of PHP? Is there something in older versions that could be blocking the update? I've got a couple of sites that are still using v5 (5.2 IIRC) and they trigger a warning that shows on the login homepage.

Are they using a caching plugin? If yes, try disabling that and seeing if the update will run.

FTP to the root of the site and see if there's a .maintenance file. If there is, delete it (or rename it to something safe) and see if the update will run.

Are they on WPv4.9.3? If yes, this might help: WordPress Update Breaks Future Auto-Updates. Manually Update Now!

 

[sim667]

Right, so her wordpress is 4.4, the most up to date version is 5.1 ish

She upgraded some plugins, but that crashed the entire site.

Her theme company have said her theme page builder is no longer compatible with the old wordpress version she's got (its vantage)

Her config does have auto updates disabled currently...... Thats where she's at at the moment.

I don't think she's overly techy, she sent me a config.php with all the passwords in plaintext in

 

[sim667]

I'm gonna ask her to look for that maintenance file

 

[RoyReed]

Otherwise you could download a zip of the latest WP, unzip it and copy all of the new files across via FTP. I've done this once and it worked, but it's nerve-wracking doing it on a live site owned by someone else. If you go down this route, make sure you make a full backup first using something like UpdraftPlus. Instructions here: Updating WordPress « WordPress Codex

 

[sim667]

She's gone very quiet on it......