I had so much fun on Twitter the other day coming up with bizarre methods of upgrading WordPress that I have decided to host a giveaway. Here is how it works. You come up with the craziest, funniest story of how WordPress could be upgraded. I’ll take what I consider to be the best three or five stories and put them in a poll and allow you to have the final say on who gets the reward which will be a single license API key for GravityForms. I’ll be on vacation next week so you have plenty of time to put your story together. Here is my crazy story of which none of it is true.
When there is an upgrade available, I should be able to ping Matt Mullenweg and have him air dropped to my location. After he lands on my roof he asks me three questions. First, is my theme GPL? Second, am I using any non GPL plugins? Third, do I advertise any themes or plugins that are non GPL? If I have answered no to any of these questions, he immediately gets in a cab and goes home. But, if I answer Yes to all of those questions, he sits in the same computer chair I do and I get to watch him perform the upgrade for me. If the upgrade breaks, we play darts to figure out which plugin or theme we want to blame and then we remove it from the site. At some point, we stop the upgrade process to have a swift drink of Famous Daves Sweet And Zesty BBQ sauce. He then tries the upgrade again until it works. Once he has upgraded my site, he gives me a hat tip, crawls inside of my PC and then emails himself as an attachment back to San Francisco.
Okay, I was sprinting along the rooftops of New York City, throwing fireballs at zombies, when my iPod Touch alerted me to a new WordPress update. Dodging to the side to avoid an oncoming zombie, I pushed it over the roof’s edge. Then I tapped out a quick email to Automattic, demanding to know why I had to take a minute out of my busy zombie-fighting day for the agonizingly difficult task of pressing a button to update my blog. Shouldn’t it be able to update itself? Or shouldn’t Automattic do it for me? What am I paying those guys my hard-earned $0.00 for? (And don’t get me started on all those spam comments that I have to remove… I shouldn’t have to take care of that.)
I took a short lunch break at Taco Bell, where I had a delicious Volcano Box meal and a large Pepsi Cola. Fortunately no zombies were present. I impatiently checked my inbox for the personal response from Matt Mullenweg that I was expecting, but it was empty. What horrible customer service.
I left the Taco Bell and fought some more zombies, and one of the three necromancers who raised the undead. Still no reply to my email.
By the end of the day, I gave up and went through the agonizingly slow upgrade process. I opened my laptop and waited for it to boot up. Then I clicked the Firefox icon and waited for it to load. Then I typed
h t t p : / / w w w . m y t o t a l l y a w e s o m e b l o g . c o m / w p - a d m i n /
and waited for the page to load. Then I typed my username and password (“admin” and “hunter2”). Now that I was in the admin page, I pressed the upgrade button in that unsightly upgrade alert bubble. I clicked the second button to confirm, and the installer ran.At first everything seemed to be fine…but my 32 plugins (that I hadn’t updated in a few months) were spitting out a sea of error messages when I tried to view any of the permalink pages. Darn WordPress updates break everything…