Nutsmuggling

This morning I decided to upgrade Iperstoria to WP 2.5.1 throught the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin by Techie Buzz.

The Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin works as advertised: it lets you upgrade you WP blog with no hassle whatsoever.

Most times.

As a matter of fact, I had upgraded Nutsmuggling automatically and had no problem. But Iperstoria is on a different host, and this time it was a different story.

After upgrading I could access to Administration section, but the front page of Iperstoria could not be loaded, and I kept on getting a 500 Internal Server Error.

After googling a bit I found a comment in this post at Andrea Beggi’s blog, suggesting the bug had something to do with files permissions.

Some web hosts are very particular about permissions; often most files in your root must be 755, sometimes other values.

Solution?

1. You are lucky, and your web host provides a script to automatically repair your files permissions. I was lucky indeed, and the problem was solved in a matter seconds
2. You’re not that lucky; you should find out the value files permissions are supposed to be and set them manually; in alternative rollback to the old WP version and upgrade manually.

At any rate, let me state clearly that this plugin is great stuff, only be extra careful when using it. I’d suggest an extra manual backup of your files, to be on the safe side; this backup might serve to inspect the files permissions, and correct them accordingly on the upgraded version.

Enjoy!
Davide