January 31, 2012 – we’ve found the culprit – the W3 Total Cache plugin. As of this writing, it’s still not playing well with 3.3 or 3.3.1, and hasn’t been updated since last August. So if you’re NOT running that plugin, you should be able to upgrade safely. However – the caution in upgrading WordPress the MINUTE it comes out remains – give your hard-working plugin developers a couple of weeks to catch up. The more plugins you run, the more likely there is to be a problem.
Hi folks, you may have gotten an email today (Monday, December 12) about the shiny new features in WordPress 3.3.
Don’t hit that upgrade button just yet!
One of my top clients, who shall remain nameless (seriously), got all excited and hit that link and bad things happened. HostGator chuckled and said, “yep, that version appears to be buggy.” And downgraded my client so his site worked again. I love HostGator tech support. I owe them all a pitcher of beer.
Our typical modus operandi here in the Rowboat is to wait about 3 weeks when big new releases come out before upgrading, to give plugin developers and webhosts a chance to catch up and let the REST of the world be the beta testers. So if you’re WebMistress clients, that’s why you see that upgrade link nagging you for a while before our team gets to it. That’s on purpose.
Be careful out there!
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Must be the plugins or themes you’ve got installed there. Or something specifically on that server…
I keep one test site where I install all the plugins I generally use, and is based on the iThemes Builder framework (as all my client sites are) Updated to 3.3 on that one with absolutely no issues.
So I gradually stepped through all of my other sites, starting with the ones under development in my test sandbox and then gradually moving to the live ones on production servers. Nary a hiccup.
One of my live sites can’t do automatic updates of themes or plugins; I have to update them manually. But even that one managed to do the WordPress update automatically and with no problems.
YMMV. And of course, as usual, make a complete backup before ANY update. I like PluginBuddy’s BackupBuddy for that…
Thanks for your comment – I know a lot of people didn’t have issues with this upgrade. However, we support a lot of clients who aren’t tech-savvy – they pay us to handle that for them, and yet they still go ahead and click that upgrade link immediately when they see it without regard for the consequence – and then they don’t have the skill to back their way out of it. Also, most of them don’t maintain “test sites” like those of us in the biz do. Since we do empower our clients to create and update their own content, many of them install every plugin they hear about – which increases the possibility of conflicts, as you know.
Therefore, we find it actually SAVES us, and our clients, time and risk to wait a few weeks after an upgrade like this is issued, to give plugin developers and hosts a chance to catch up and issue their own updates.