Wordpress 4.4 Update a Steaming Pile of Bugs

Oh man what a mess!

[martinibuster]

Some people are reporting fatal errors [wordpress.org] and admin panel lockouts. I can attest that this update is not smooth. Someone else posted to my Facebook post about this that once you do get updated that it's a bug-filled mess.

FYI.

[ergophobe]

The reports I saw were related to missing files, which is curious and makes me think there was some permissions messup.

All seems right in my WP world.

I do really wish WP would distinguish between security updates and enhancement updates like Drupal does. With Drupal I always skip anything that is not a security update unless it is supposed to fix a known issue. With Wordpress you never know.

[Hoople]

My guess is those 'some people' feel that maintaining a mirror test environment is for WP newb's.

I've had one since my WP 3.1 days. My plug-in list rarely scrolls, so it might be some plug-ins others use haven't affected me? On the one site that has more plug-ins it has a mirror site too. Test, test again and retest <G>

I also have a test site that pulls down the nightly builds. That gives me a heads up on any plug-ins failing due to upcoming changes. Rare that one breaks though as most of my plug-ins are mainstream (>50,000 downloads).

[martinibuster]

Manual update worked. Could have been a plugin conflict.

[ergophobe]

>>mirror test environment is for WP newb

Actually, I suspect it's beyond most WP users.

That's what I used to do (and it's web suicide to do anything else with Drupal). But I changed that a bit after getting hit by Drupageddon b/c I didn't update fast enough (something like 80% of sites worldwide were infected within 6 hours) and how hard it was to recover from (you pretty much had to burn down the server and rebuild from a pre-exploit backup b/c the exploit was so bad you couldn't tell whether or not backdoors had been installed at the server level). It was a nightmare and took countless hours of work to get all the sites on that server cleaned, vetted and migrated to a new safe server.

So now with Drupal I update the test environment, run any automated tests, click around a tiny bit and then push to production ASAP.

With Wordpress, I have it set to update automatically and have everything under version control. If the update brings the site down, I roll back with git, upload the last backup DB and done.

Again, Wordpress is frustrating. There are two things that Drupal does that make this easier
- differentiate security and other updates
- have a defined release window for zero-day exploits so you know that if one has been found, when it will be announced so you can be ready for it.

Obviously exploits that are already in the wild are another matter, but typically that's the small minority of security fixes.

[robzilla]

No troubles here after updating. In fact, it's flying now that I've also upgraded PHP to version 7.

[ergophobe]

>>upgraded PHP to version 7.

You live on the edge ;-)

[ergophobe]

But now I see... benchmarking on Wordpress shows more than double as many requests per second can be handled with PHP 7.
[talks.php.net...]

[robzilla]

The WordPress folks said there should be no compatibility issues, so I just went for it :-) It's a hell of a lot easier to install and manage than HHVM, and CPU usage is down by 50%, memory usage about 33%, admin panel just feels snappier.