The last time I updated my WP installation, it was quick & easy and smooth sailing… for about a month, when Loosely Speaking magically crashed on the morning of my birthday. It then took a month, much trial and error, help from some great colleagues, one very amazing tech support person at my host company, and ultimate restoring of my original version (2.6) to get back online.

I know, WP experts will advise me that it wasn’t magic but rather misbehavior of a dormant plugin or something else I did or misjudged. And I acknowledge that: remember, I blog for the pleasure of sharing ideas and news and am not a technical writer.

Ahem. That said, I am a pretty geeky chick, but sometimes these updates just seem like a magical mystery tour.

Yesterday I discovered I’d been largely de-indexed by Google (again) due to a hacker’s evil redirect. Now, this has happened before so I calmly investigated my code upon noticing a dramatic SERP drop. Spotting the offending base-64 code, I sliced it out and wrote a request for reconsideration to Google.

But then I faced the inevitable: I have to update WordPress again, if only for security purposes.

I used ftp to manually perform this update and immediately encountered a number of error messages. I sorted them out in short order and had most everything humming again within a couple of hours.

The only remaining big mess was the admin panel which wasn’t seeing its intended CSS and image files.

A colleague recommended reinstallation of the wp-admin files. This cleaned up the admin panel, but the visual editor was still inoperable. A reinstall of the wp-includes files seems to have been the answer. After trying for a number of hours to find the right fix, I’m lucky that these two simple tasks solved my issues. In looking for solutions, I found scads of good folks recommending things to try, with just as many people still looking at error codes after trying numerous fixes.

Over the next month other newts and toads will surely appear and I will wave my magic WordPress wand and say a few incantations, banishing all new forms of evil. Remember, 2.8 was just released, so those of us who jump in this soon are taking some risks.

This is a good learning opportunity for me when I’m working with my own site. But what if you are a web developer offering WP installs and customization for clients? Can one disclaim future issues, or must he or she assume responsibility for repairing any subsequent hacks or tricky updates?

There are far too many variables to make this a predictable and easy process: just check the various forums and other blogs where users document their experiences.

We all use different themes and plugins, which many of us customize endlessly, and our files surely contain some deprecated coding.

I remain a stalwart fan of WordPress but struggle to explain the nature of this beast when speaking with clients.

What do YOU do?