As I just found out, it seems that Worpdress and its Automated Upgrade feature may still have some kinks in it to work out.
As a part of the upgrade process, WordPress drops a .maintenance in order to signify that the Blog is undergoing some changes, and presumably to stop access to the database and files while changes are being carried out in the background. The unfortunate thing is, that if the Tools -> Upgrade page only half completes, the file is not removed thus rendering your fantastic blog unusable. Not exactly the best outcome, given that the admin control panel is also disabled.
Worry not, the fix to this is to simply remove this file:
[user@host] ~$ rm ~/path/to/wordpress/installation/.maintenance
Voila! Your site is back on its feet. I’d highly suggest giving the upgrade a second bash, to ensure the upgrade completes successfully, or to start the beginnings of tracing what the source of your upgrade woes may be. Plugins are at the top of my shoot-to-kill list.
Leif is a UNIX Systems Administrator for a Tier 1 Australian Telco, an avid amateur photographer and general purpose geek. He has been working Unix environments for 5 years, and bought his first Digital SLR body in mid 2004.
February 12th, 2009 at 9:50 am
Wow! Nice one. I’ve bookmarked this in Delicious. I’ll be upgrading soon (last time I tried, WP told me I had the current version already), and this is exactly the sort of thing that always seems to happen to me. Thanks mate.