I have sort of taken for granted how easy all the updates are for a WordPress site. If there is a security update WordPress just goes up and updates itself without me doing anything and the plugin community is so active there are frequent updates to all of the plugins I used. Because it always just works I don’t really hesitate to run any of the updates when I see them on the site.

Obviously what happens next is no surprise yesterday I saw there was an update to 2 of my plugins so I just clicked upgrade and next thing you know when I clicked on any admin page I just got a blank white page. My first question was is my entire site down? So I checked and nope I could see all the content fine just couldn’t get into the admin.

They say every crisis is an opportunity and this sort of proves that point, I figured well no big deal I can deal with it later, and given that I don’t have SSH keys to this site on my work computer anyway I figured I would deal with it last night. Last night I did some googling and found out how to deal with a bad plugin install (basically rename your plugin dir and hit the plugin page which will disable all the plugins). I then renamed it back and updated the probably offending plugin as it had a new version already (and I had just updated during the day otherwise it had crashed in that update and it needed the update still), and then activated my plugins one by one and life is good.

So I am back up and running and the whole thing ended up being a good learning opportunity for me, but it prevented me from working on what I wanted to write about last night which was the Internet of Things Coding Workshop that I had attended, but that will come next.