JamestheJust

Next time, if there is a next time for these errors, I’ll do that.

There’s a “purge” button at MaxCDN I used, I didn’t have to do much really. I found my pull zone, went to cache and hit purge I think. That did the trick.

Sorry for the silly questions, now that you mention it, it makes perfect sense! Thanks for the help.

OK, so I took Willie Jackson’s advice and emailed the W3TC team. He got back to me and suggested again I try to purge my CDN’s pull zone, and it worked fine!

I also wound up paring-down my options, like not minifying JS/CSS, not using Object and Database cache (apparently I had these all turned on, my hosting service says NOT to enable those things…whoops!).

My page speed is not as high as before, but it’s still a noticeable improvement using 3rd party page speed checking tools. So all told, this is case closed, I’m still happily using W3TC. Thanks for the help!

Jennifer2010:

A little more details: You’re saying you’ve tried deselecting “minify”, but are still using the CDN when you do that?

In other words, even without minifying, the CDN is not serving your CSS files correctly? Or?

Yes, I de-selected minify per my theme developer’s suggestion. Then I used the CDN – even though MaxCDN says to select manual minification in their instructions…

When I do that, my navigation menu changes won’t save (my theme allows you to customize a lot of the styling). That’s <b>the only thing</b> that doesn’t load properly – everything else style-wise seems fine.

What I would do is look at the source code and find the css that’s being used, load it, and see if the styling is present but just not catching.

I know how to look at the source code – but how do you “load” CSS? I’m not sure I follow you here.

What are your settings for CSS in the minify section when you try this?

I’m not sure what you mean here, either – when I try to “load” the CSS? I don’t know what you mean by loading the CSS or how to even attempt that.

Willie Jackson –

I’ll drop you all a note. In the mean time I’m double-checking settings per the CDN and see if there’s something I missed…

Oh there are a LOT of blogs using AIOSEO – it’s better than nothing – but it’s entirely over-rated.

Yoast’s is a great one to use, too – there are a lot of good ones to choose from. There are too many technical aspects to SEO IMHO to be satisfied with an anemic, hyped-up plugin that it surprises me so many people suggest AIOSEO anymore.

For instance, canonical URLs, internal linking, robots and htaccess files modifications, head tag modifications, 404 error monitoring, etc.

All these functions can be monitored by SEO Ultimate, however.

Why buy a Ford when you can get a Rolls Royce for the same price?

wrightp48 glad it worked! I did move on from Backup Creator to WP Dolly (or WordPress Dolly, I forget the name of it) and have had zero issues.

The other problem (for me) was using a global-updater plugin, so I updated all my sites’ plugins/themes all at once…that was a bad idea.

It worked just fine until I installed this plugin (BC), and I’m not sure I’ll ever go back to a global update tool again after this fiasco.

Anyway, I don’t want to bad-mouth Robert Plank or his tool (I own other plugins of his that are fine), but the comedy of errors wasn’t so funny on my end.

Global updates + new untested plugin = trouble.

But glad your site’s back up!

The pages I’ve used this plugin on have a shortcode when you look at the post editor. When the page renders for a reader, the page is fine, all content in place like it’s supposed to be. I can’t speak about your other problem, though.

This is part of the chat from HostGator, where they gave me instructions on how they got my site to work.

(6:53 pm) [Kenneth P.] Ok james I was able to get the site working again. What I did is changed the theme and moved the plugins to plugins.bak

(6:53 pm) [james hussey]: OK so how would I do this on my own?
(6:53 pm) [james hussey]: How did you change the theme?
(6:54 pm) [james hussey]: And did you just rename the plugins folder?
(6:55 pm) [Kenneth P.] I did just rename the plugins folder and what I change the theme from phpmyadmin
(6:56 pm) [james hussey]: how do you change a theme from phpmyadmin?
(6:56 pm) [Kenneth P.] https://wordpress.shadowlantern.com/change-wordpress-theme-in-phpmyadmin/ here is a link that will show you hwo to do this.
(6:56 pm) [james hussey]: Thanks.

So from there, I was able to re-upload my plugins one by one, activating each to see which was the problem. I didn’t find any errors, so I chose my theme and that was that: worked fine.

Not sure why just deleting the plugin didn’t work, though.

Papajon – thanks, I basically had my hosting service help me. (HostGator)

They basically renamed my plugin folder to “plugins.bak” and then in phpMyAdmin they selected the 2011 theme.

I don’t know how to do that last part myself (but I will do it on my remaining 3 sites that are down, there’s a tutorial link they gave me I’ll post here when I find the email).

As for the plugin, I’m sure it works fine now, I just wish they’d fixed it before the release of 3.3, this has been a huge waste of time.

Robert –

I have no interest in discussing your plugin here, the screenshot I have of our conversation (with Lance, not you) is not in your favor. Since you brought it up, I did not ask for a refund, I said, “If you don’t plan on supporting it then I need a refund.”

That’s hardly the same thing.

This post and forum, however, is not about your plugin, it’s about getting my sites back online, which run on WordPress.

I’d rather keep the conversation focused where it needs to be, but thank you for your support (I think your demeanor BTW is totally professional, and yes: the new Backup Creator IS compatible w/WP 3.3 – right now though my issue is 4 downed sites).

Robert, thanks again for the reply. Getting back on point, I need to know what steps to take to recover my sites. I have already removed the plugin via FTP, which brings them back on line (front end only).

The backend is inaccessible.

I did. Lance T gave me a refund rather than support.

It’s the same solutions, esmi, but thanks. Still no dice.

I’ve done all the above and it doesn’t work. I noticed on the manual upgrade this step (written for version 3.2):

Step 1.5: Remove .maintenance file
If you’re upgrading manually after a failed auto-upgrade, delete the file .maintenance from your WordPress directory using FTP. This will remove the “failed update” nag message.

I have no such file.

I’ve used CPanel and then Filezilla – can’t find that file at all, I keep getting the message,

No Update Required

Your WordPress database is already up-to-date!

But I cannot access my wp-admin. I’ve tried phpMyAdmin to set all plugins to the mentioned setting “0” and that didn’t work…all this caused by a plugin called Backup Creator which wasn’t ready for WP 3.3 (?!)…it was a premium plugin and has wreaked havoc on 4 of my sites.

I have out of 6 affected sites, resurrected my most important 2, including https://theaveragegenius.net – but what I don’t understand is that in those 2 resurrected/working sites, both running Backup Creator, all I did was use CPanel to delete my Backup Creator plugin.

It didn’t work subsequently…now I’m down 4 sites and hours of lost time – the manual install didn’t work.

Help would be appreciated.

Have you tried to access your site via FTP and delete the plugin from the plugins folder? It’s usually under wp_content, but I haven’t done that with a caching plugin. It worked doing so with a different plugin altogether, though.

I’m not a techie, but I’ve had similar problems with other cache plugins and simply contacted my web host. HostGator helped in a few minutes set it all right.