WordPress and the Erroneous Update Message

It’s time for a little example in debugging!

This domain is running WordPress trunk.  When I say that, what I mean is I’m running the very latest SVN, no more than four hours behind, thanks to a cron job.  At the moment I’m writing this, I’m on revision 18690.  I did this so that I could get off by butt and actually test thing without having to think about it.  To a degree, it tells you how much trust I have in WordPress and the core commit team.  My whole site runs because they know what they’re doing.

This doesn’t mean there aren’t errors, though.  So far I’ve been very “helpful” breaking the responsive CSS on the admin dashboard.  I’m sure Helen, Andrew and Andrew just adore me right now.  Yes, that was sarcasm.  My methodology is pretty straight forward.  Just Use WordPress on ipstenu.org.  If I find a problem, make a note and bring up my local install.  I can only do this at home, on my Mac, so usually I come home with three or four notes.  Update SVN manually on ipstenu.loc (yes) and ipstenu.org.  Is the problem still there?

Most of the time the problem goes away.  When it doesn’t, I take a screenshot and make a trac ticket (though perhaps I should add them all to the one ticket… if any of you core folks wants to tell me, please comment away!).  I’ve also taken to popping onto the IRC channel #wordpress-ui and chatting with people there before trac’ing.  Last night I found one, told someone working on the project, and she patched it right then and there.  Teamwork!

Yesterday, I noticed my ipstenu.org site had a weird problem.  I have a subsite on the network called test.ipstenu.org (feel free to check it out).  It’s just there so when someone says “When I use this theme/plugin…” and I can quickly go look.  I make fake posts, etc etc.  It’s quite seriously just for testing.  At one point, I’d spun up bbPress on that site.  I’d since turned it off, but it was on RC4.  RC5 just came out this week, and I had an update message on only that site, telling me to upgrade it.  Instead I deleted it.  That made the update notice go away on my network dashboard, like it should, but not on test.ipstenu.org.

Say what?

I tried to reproduce this like mad.  I installed bbPress RC4 on my local box, activated it, left it active, deleted it, and pretty much every which way I could think of to break it.  The error only happened on that site, even though bbPress had been running on another subsite as well!  I checked on multiple browsers, and wiped cache, logged out, nuked cookies, etc. Multiple computers even! Finally I gave up and said “I need help.”

Weird WordPress MultiSite Question

I have a multisite and one site on that network is showing that I need to update a plugin. Every other site correctly says “No Updates!” This one doesn’t.

I’ve poked around, but I had assumed (bad me) that the admin bar would cache that network wide, somehow. But then why is it only on one site? So I wiped and rebuilt the wp_10_options table and it still shows up.

I haven’t the foggiest idea why it’s happening. Luckily this is only on my test site, test.ipstenu.org, but it’s maddening.

I don’t find a huge amount of use for Google Plus, but that was great for me.  I posted, I tagged it with my WordPress circles, and went to catch my train.  It was too long for a tweet, too weird for the forums as I didn’t want people to get fussy – I’ve noticed if I raise a post, it scares people.  I guess I have ‘street cred’ on WP and some people worry when I have a problem I can’t fix right away.  Flattering.

I got replies from Raincoaster, Brad, Ron & Andrea, and Otto, who all said “That is weird.”  Andrea pointed out that it could be caching.  Brad asked about plugins.  Otto and Ron said that if it was cached, it was network wide (which made it even weirder to only see it on one site), and then Ron told me to look in wp_sitemeta table.  I was, I admit, already looking there, but I’d gotten distracted when I found the “Add a Link” page was broken on trunk.

After Ron’s comment kicked my pants, I went to that table and thought to myself “Where are the caches?”  I knew this from ages back, that anything named _transient… was a cache.  There are tons of transient feeds in your wp_options table because the RSS feeds you see on the dashboard are cached.  Cool, right?  Well, what if, just what if one of them was corrupted?  You can delete them without hurting your site!  So I hovered my mouse over the update alert and noticed the mouseover said “1 Plugin Update.”  Then I looked at the transients and found this:

_site_transient_update_plugins

And I deleted it.

And my error went away.

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

I’m Mika (aka Ipstenu) and I’m complicated. I’ve been on the net since the days of dedicated terminals and Novation CAT modems and solved Missionaries and Cannibals (or Goats and Cabbages) before I was six, and blog about WordPress and technical/computer things at Half Elf on Tech.

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