What the heck happened to the UMP Announcements slider last week??? It was on the site, it was off the site, it warped into a different slider, was gone again, then finally came back…
OK – Here’s what happened. I was updating the web site with new announcements and special events, when I looked over to my “Plugins” list and saw, “New Update available” for my slider. I read the summary of the update – it has new toys & functionality!! Now the geek in me was really excited!!
Anxiously, I clicked on “update automatically” – same way I do with any other plugin update. Usually the update downloads, installs, and restarts the plugins automatically. The process takes about ten seconds. This day, that was not to be….
An error came up indicating the new update did not install properly, there was a fatal error somewhere in the long list of code. The whole thing looks like some sort of foreign language jibberish to me. To top it all off, my slider was no longer on the home page… or anywhere else!
Much research was done trying to figure out how to bring the slider back or find a substitute. Tech support from the slider developers indicated I needed to upgrade my WordPress version. I attempted to do this in the past, apparently I have to upgrade a bunch of behind the scenes software to move to the latest version of WordPress. Everything had been working fine up to now, so I didn’t see any reason to upgrade…
Now I had a reason to upgrade…
We started the upgrade project on the back-up server, and it didn’t go so well. A couple days later, everything was sorted out, upgraded and we were ready to do the production server. The production server was upgraded a day later, and we’re back in business!
The upgrade broke a couple other plug-ins, but we finally got all the apples back on the cart, and the web site is upgraded and working great!
Summary: Upgraded slider and broke it. Took some other upgrades to make the new version work. Now it’s fixed.
