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I just updated to Wordpress 2.6.1 today, ignoring my own advice to wait for a week to allow the plugin and theme authors time to catch up.

Actually – I never upgraded to WP 2.6 last month because of the problems that some people had with that, so I was already a version behind and I’ll be away next week, so I decided to go for it.

And it was probably the wrong thing to do..!

I had 3 problems:

1) After the database upgrade I found that I was not able to log back in to my admin screens.

This was the problem that some people reported from the 2.6 upgrade, and was the reason I didn’t do that one – so maybe it has something to do with the move from 2.5 to 2.6.x. I hope we don’t have the same problems when 2.7 hits the streets!

The Fix: Quite by chance I tried closing everything down and re-booting my PC and it worked. I don’t know why – it shouldn’t have done because WP is a web based application, not client based. But it did.

But the lesson is: be sure to back up everything before you do an upgrade – both your database and your system files!

2) I could not reactivate The Popularity Contest plugin – it caused a fatal error.

I don’t know why this was and, when I checked the author’s site, he said that he didn’t support Popularity Contest and that I’d have to go to the Wordpress Forums for support. Well, I’ve never had too much success with the Wordpress Forums so I decided to see if there was another plugin that did the same thing.

Luckily I found the wPopularity plugin which, by a stroke of good fortune, was based on the Popularity Contest plugin.

The Fix: I installed and activated the wPopularity plugin and everything now works fine again.

3) I use the WP Automatic Upgrade Plugin and it didn’t reactivate the plugins at the end of its process. Again I don’t know why, but it may have been because the Popularity Contest plugin was causing a fatal error.

The Fix: I reactivated the plugins manually and then re-ran the Auto upgrade plugin so that it could complete the process and clean up the files.

And everything is working fine now.

Again – if you’re doing an upgrade be sure to back up your database and files fully before you start..!

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