ckassel

Google may have been telling me what was missing, but it was in Geek, or Greek, or something. Your answer was better. I am up and running now! Thank you!

I tried not setting it, setting it, you name it. I followed those steps in that link to the letter. No dice. For now, I’ve had to disable the plugin altogether and just embed the Google Calendar.

Good advice. Alas, my predecessor didn’t really understand this sort of thing. I’m working on untangling the strands so that upgrades are easier.

I’m going to close out this thread, but I will say this: in my dev environment, I turned off all plugins and selected the Twenty Thirteen theme, and then I turned on plugins one by one, switched on my theme again, and… the question marks did not come back. So now I guess I need to do a similar thing with production. I’m afraid this probably won’t help anyone else with the problem.

Thanks for the suggestions! Sure enough, with a default theme and all plugins deactivated, the problem does not occur, so the update appears to be fine. I’m now turning on plugins one by one and will update this thread if there’s anything useful for others in my testing. (We have some customizations that were done in a non-WordPress way, and I’m weaving my way through that to standardize the install.)

Well, I did have both of those lines… but then I did some comparisons of the old wp-config and the new one.

Those of you who know this won’t be surprised, but apparently, the instructions for upgrading WPMU version 2.x to WordPress version 3.0 were to make a few adjustments to wp-config and to .htaccess. This did not convert a WPMU install to the new WordPress multisite model. I can’t believe this is how it was done, but it is. So every subsequent upgrade works, but it never actually converts the WPMU setup to a multisite install.

When I tried to migrate the site to another host, I first set up WordPress multisite as a shell and then attempted to import the content into it. This will not work! It’s possible that it could work if you export and import each blog, but in my case, I had a plugin (CommentPress) that breaks if you do an export/import on the content.

So here’s what I did instead: 1) Created an empty database. 2) Imported my database into it. 3) Copied over all my files. 4) Used the search-replace tool to update the database with the new URL. 5) Went into PHPMyAdmin so I could clean up additional fields that the tool didn’t find. 6) Edited .htaccess and wp-config to reference the new URL and database credentials. It worked.

I’m going to close this out, but I’m leaving all this information here in case anyone finds themselves in this situation. Thanks, everyone, for your help. You led me in the right direction, and I appreciate it.

Thank you so much for your responses! In fact, this site WAS a WPMU site. I believe it started with version 2.7 or so. It’s been around a long time. If you have quick advice for me, based on this information, let me know. Otherwise, I’ll keep digging. Thanks!