Just lost our whole site doing wp upgrade

Okay I’ve just created one called:

[Moderated – Please don’t share sensitive information]

okay, so aoc is the username,
brisbanemobileaccountant.com is the hostname,
and the password You have created. Using these You should be able to log into Your account with FileZilla

@brent Havill, Your hosting providers should be guiding you on how to create FTP accounts with their systems.

The WordPress discussion stopped at:

We downloaded FileZilla, but when we try to connect to our hostserver (hg) it comes up with error message:

@andrew, You are completely right, sorry about that. However, I am happy to assist @brent Havill, can I do that here?

Hope so – we need all the help we can get – we’re newbies

bh

I’ll try to login to Filezilla soon.

bh

Okay, we’ve just reuploaded the func.php file into our file manager – we seem to have access to wp-admin even thought there is errors in the site.

What should we do now? De-activate the wplms theme? Are you sure it wont wreck anything if we activate twentyfourteen or twentyfifteen because we have only got licence for wplms?

I just dont want to make things even worse!

bh

In fact, when we try to do a ‘live preview’ of twentyfourteen or twentyfifteen – it just comes up with an error message:

Home:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function vibe_validate() in /home4/brentonh/public_html/australiaonlinecourses.com/wp-content/plugins/vibe-course-module/includes/bp-course-template.php on line 643

bh

If You have access to Your wp-admin, that is a really good progress.

I have read more about the theme You are using. Generally speaking, You only lose any kind of data (meaning: delete) when You delete a theme also, simply by activating an other theme does not delete data.

Your licence is valid for Your domain name, that means, if You, let’s say, move to a new server, or Your site get’s hacked, and You need to reinstall a theme or plugin, there is no need to purchase a theme or a plugin again, because You have purchased the licence for a single site, or in other words, a single domain name.

Having said that, I see that Your site is loading with the theme, so I think You should try to backtrace the various error messages You get.

What does the WordPress update page say now? Is there any plugin or theme that still need updating?

The error message You have posted, now points to the plugin vibe-course-module. However, the strange thing I noticed, in both error messages there is a mention for bp, which I think stands for BuddyPress. Is BuddyPress up and running on Your WordPress installation?

Balint

Well I just sent a ‘admin test message’ to a student, which goes thru buddypress & it seemed ot work okay saying ‘message sent to 1 members’ which is normal.
If it’s not wkg it says ‘message sent to 0 members’

So you think I should try to activate twentyfourteen or twentyfifteen?

bh

I have take a look again at Your site, if I am not mistaken, right now Your site loads with the wplms theme, so there is no need to change the theme. That was needed when Your site was showing only that nasty error message.
Right now You need to fix those elements that are not working. Are there any plugins now deactivated, that You usually use on Your site?

Balint

Yes, looks like just about all were de-activated when we did a ‘bulk apply’ deactivation which gave us our whitescreen.

I have just activated all that we usually use now and the whole site seems to be working as it was.

I could try to deactivate plugins one at a time, instead of ‘bulk apply’ which we did the first time which took us down

What do you think?

bh

But why did You deactivated them? To update?

Yes

We are upgrading to latest version of wp

bh

You don’t need to deactivate a plugin or a theme to do an update. It is most likely that these plugins and the theme are dependent on each other, and the error message You were experiencing the first time, was caused because the theme is dependent to a plugin which was deactivated.

When You update a plugin, WordPress takes care of the deactivating before the update process and after the re-enabling of the plugin.

In my experience the best way to update a complex site which is Yours, is to update the plugins one by one, and after each plugin update, ensure that everything is working. When all the plugins are up to date, update the theme, and lastly WordPress itself.

For Your current situation, I recommend to enable the plugins one by one, again, checking if everything is OK after each enable, and then proceed with the update. By the way, I think in Your case it would be a really really wise decision to run some backups of Your own, and not rely solely on the web host’s backups.