Support

November 14, 2024 at 6:17 am

Hi there,

Reason for this is the fact that the Plugin Update doesnt work anymore. It simply crashes our whole WordPress Site.

Can you add more details on this please?

What happens? You mentioned it crashes the whole site so I’m guessing there’s a fatal error (any fatal errors from any plugin will bring down the site with ‘the white screen of death, WSOD).

We want to install the newest version now and I want to know if there is a best practice around that makes sure that the old App Version is removed but the Database stays put.

So, this doesn’t really make sense and I’ll explain why.

When you update a plugin within WordPress what it actually does is delete the current version you have installed, download the .zip file for the update and extra it in the plugins directory of the same… essentially it replaces the current version with the one from the update. It doesn’t partially download specific files and replace certain parts, it deleted the original plugin root directory and extracts the ‘new’ one in its place.

(Note I’m talking about the plugins files here, not the data stored in the database)

So when you do what I think you are suggesting above, you do exactly the same as an ‘update’ does, in that you are replacing the current version with the latest one.

So the reason that doesn’t make sense is if you are having issues running the update, you’ll have the exact same issue when you manually update. Because the end result is exactly the same, just the method of getting there was slightly different.

So to fix this, we need to know what is happening when you update and work from there, the best way to do that is to using a staging/development copy of the site away from the live site and update there to find out what happens and work on whatever needs to be fixed.

With regards to your event data, its all stored in the database, it is NOT removed when you update. Howver, if there is a site migration from your current version to the latest (and on your version there will be) you are giving the option to either migrate the data over to the latest database schema, or not migrate and start fresh. The short answer for 99% of users there is they ALWAYS want to run the migrations.

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So… before moving forward or doing anything else, create a FULL site backup of your site. Both the database and the files.

I would use something like Updraft: https://wordpress.org/plugins/updraftplus/

Then, we can start working out what goes wrong, do you have a staging site?

Running through updates like this is not something we cover update standard support so this will likey need a support token (or possibly more than one depending on what the issue is) but lets see where we get to first, I just wanted to be upfront about this first.