Posted On October 23, 2009 At 8:46 AM 
By It was just yesterday I log in to my Blogging Junction and found a message 
saying WordPress 2.8.5 is available…Please Upgrade.
With efforts to make WordPress 2.9 safer and fill it with features WordPress group released WordPress 2.8.5 before it to keep WordPress blogs safe till WordPress 2.9 is released. There are some changed in WordPress 2.8.5.
The headline changes in this release are:
- A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
- Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
- Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
- Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.
As usual it was recommended to upgrade WordPress immediately to be on a safer side from hackers and other spammers.
Without a second thought I clicked on the Upgrade Automatically button and here arise the problem. I got the message successfully upgraded and when I closed the upgrade window and again tried to access the login page, I wasn’t able to. It showed some HTTP 500 Server error. I was shocked to see that my site looked normal as before but I wasn’t able to login.
I tried several things to solve this problem. As this message was appearing all the time I was trying to login I tried clearing my browser cache but to no effect. Problem wasn’t solved. Then I thought there might be some error in the upgrade process, so I tried installing WordPress manually. But still the problem didn’t go away. I was about to cry when I wasn’t able to login. I wasn’t in any way prepared to restore the site backup. It wastes so much time and I also had to re-post some of my previous posts as they were not in the backup. Not only this my comments would also be lost and re-posting them. Aahh…
So I decided to find the solution to his problem instead of restoring the backup. Something came in my mind and I decided that to go through “wp-settings.php” and “wp-config.php” file. There was absolutely no problem in wp-config.php. Then I checked wp-settings.php file. Nothing seemed to be changed here. But there was one minute change in that file. My PHP memory limit was changed to 32 M from 128 M that I had set before. I never thought that this would be causing the problem. But still I changed it back to 128 M and visited the login page. And to my luck the login page was back to normal and the HTTP 500 Server error had gone.
This was my problem was solved and the site was back to normal and me too 
.
So I recommend you all to upgrade your WordPress installation to the latest one i.e. WordPress 2.8.5. If you are lucky enough, you won’t get this problem 
.
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This Post Has Got 8 Comments
My first problem is that the automatic update seems do not work in my current blog.
Which WordPress version do you use ?
I use 2.8.4 but i installed it trough fantastisco.
Are you using a free host? Sometimes Fantastisco blogs upgrade fails. So its recommended to manually install WordPress the first time and then perform auto upgrades.
I use paid hosting but i think it is because i use fantastisco. So, i will try to upgrade manually.
Yeah, you please try and tell me the result… I too think fantastisco is causing the problem… But before installing / upgrading wordpress manually do not forget to take a backup of your site…
Be sure to back up all files, images and plugins included before any upgrade. I am going to do my upgrade later this week.