SteadyUP

Close scrutiny of wp-includes revealed there were actually about 40 files missing compared to the proper 6.1 folder—fully replacing that brought the site back up, and then doing the same for wp-admin brought the back end up. Thanks for your input, moving hundreds of files around always makes me nervous when I’m not 100% sure what I’m doing.

I’ve got to say, though, as this was an automatic update it would have been nice if WP gave me any indication whatsoever that something had failed. They always notify me when an update happens successfully but the one time I actually need to know what’s going on I had to figure it all out from scratch.

• This reply was modified 2 years ago by SteadyUP.

As I stated in my original message, I’ve already attempted resetting my theme and plugins. I was hoping for a more delicate solution than re-uploading all of WP but I will do so if no one has any more specific ideas.

Thanks again, at least I can sleep now.

That did it! Thank you so, so much. I’ve had security problems in the past but never this severe–how likely is it that this was malicious?

…well that’s interesting, it’s blank. Could that happen accidentally or have I been hacked? I have UpdraftPlus backing the site up but I’m not sure how to go about just retrieving that one file. What should I try first?

Thanks!

Actually I eventually found the tag and fixed it just like that–by flailing around blindly. So it’s fixed, but now that you mention it, I’m aware of child themes but I’m not 100% confident how to make one–is it as simple as duplicating the existing theme folder in the FTP client and just giving it a different name?

Thanks for responding. I had the same thought about just searching for “author”, as well, though I wish there was a way to search all the php files at once instead of just opening them one at a time. All’s well that ends well, I guess.

Hi, I’m having a pretty similar problem so I figured I’d tack myself on to this thread–I recently updated my theme, zeeMagazine, and totally borked my blog so I had to reinstall the old version manually. That worked fine but now coauthors don’t show up at all on the front end so I must have to re-edit a tag somewhere. Problem is, I can’t find anything with “the_author” or “the_author_posts” in it–not author.php, single.php, or several other files that I’ve checked randomly. I worked my way through your advice, stapleshotz, but my theme doesn’t seem to have any of the other files you mention. You seem to have a much better sense of what you’re doing than I do though, so any ideas? Thanks!