Updating your plugins from your admin panel in WordPress is very handy. That’s why when this feature went broke here in this blog, I went crazy finding for solutions on how I can solve it.
If you search Google on some solutions for it, you can find a lot but the problem is it can just confuse you to death. I myself was stucked with this problem for weeks, if not months. I know its funny but I became really frustrated because I couldn’t find the solution that would work for me.
So in this blog posts I am going to list different ways on how to fix it so that if a blogger or whoever gets stucked with this problem too, he can get to try the following.
WordPress Plugin Upgrade Failed
This problem is basically when you cannot update your plugins using your admin panel in WordPress. Unfortunately you can also not install new plugins using the admin. Here’s the typical look of it:
Here are the following solutions for it:
Solution 1. Chmod the upgrade directory to 777
You can do this either using file manager in CPanel or using your FTP access. Basically you have to go to the upgrades directory inside wp-content, and then change its permission from 644 to 777. What this means is that you’re permitting the upgrade directory to read write and execute without any restrictions. This have seemed to be working solution for most people.
Solution 2. Delete upgrade directory and recreate it.
If the first one doesn’t work, then try to do this one. Basically you just have to delete the upgrade directory and then recreate it.
Solution 3. Edit class-wp-filesystem-direct.php
This one came from this blog although this solution is quite a bit complicated and scary so you may want to make sure you have performed your backups just in case something wrong happens.
Basically it involves adding this line into the mentioned file above:
function mkdir($path, $chmod = false, $chown = false, $chgrp = false) {
// safe mode fails with a trailing slash under certain PHP versions.
$path = untrailingslashit($path);
if ( empty($path) )
$path = ‘/’;
if ( ! $chmod ) $chmod = FS_CHMOD_DIR;
Solution 4. Disabling Ask Apache Password Protect Plugin
This was the solution that worked for me. Oddly enough there weren’t that many people who talk about this so if the three solutions above didn’t work for you, then I’m pretty sure this fourth solution will, just like how it worked for me.
So if you have this plugin, all you have to do is disable (or delete it) and then update your plugins. I don’t know why but I just cannot afford to use a plugin that will bring me a problem like this so I don’t think I will ever use it again.
That’s it. You can try each solutions one at a time and hopefully one of them can help you solve this wordpress plugin upgrade problem. If you have questions then feel free to ask in the comment section.
Love this Melvin. This is one thing that often happens to me and sometimes I just “quit” from trying to upgrade. Good timing as I have some plugins I need to upgrade and should they fail, this post will run to the rescue. Thanks and keep it up
Nice tips man. Looks like a WordPress-tips category is evolving on this blog 🙂 Btw, Happy New Year to you Melvin.
this never happened on my main blog before but I experienced to fail updating a plugin on my other blog. basically, what happened was I reloaded the page while I was upgrading 5 plugins at the same time. after that, This message appeared to all my website’s directory: “the site is currently on maintainance mode. check back in a few minutes”
I don’t know if this happens to everyone but on my sites, every time wordpress fails to update a plugin automatically, it creates a .maintainance file on the site’s index. basically, all I’ll have to do is delete the .maintainance file and then re-update the plugin again. then everything would be back to normal.
Looks like a WordPress-tips category is evolving on this blog
Nice! This has happened to me before. I have like a hundred WP plugins installed. If it fails, I always just give up and move on to something else. I’m not a programmer so I don’t know how to figure this stuff out. Now when it happens again, I’ll know where to look for troubleshooting. 😉
I must admit that I have never received this problem. I’ve had the problem where a plugin causes a fatal error when trying to activate, but never the error you mentioned.
Still I a msure a lot of people have received this error and you will have stopped them pulling out the rest of their hair. 🙂
lol. I don’t think so. I just included this here because it has bothered me a lot
I’m not a programmer either but we just gotta continue searching and testing things out. 😉
Hi Melvin,
The tips you mentioned above will be very helpful for me. It IS easier that there are notifications on the admin that tells you some plugins have upgrades available, but there were some plug-ins that tend to have errors on my blog when I upgrade them automatically – to the point that I was kind of hesitant to update plugins or something else on my blog (there were about a dozen or so update notifications there at one time).
Thanks for sharing!
I have the same problem with my plugins.
> My host adapted my chmod without asking, so I changed them again but still got the same problem.
> Deleting the directory upgrade didn’t help eather
> I don’t have the plugin so that’s no option for me.
> so I wanted to change the class but I haven’t got that file in my wp-includes. How is that possible. Running 3.0.4 now… same issue with upgrading wordpress in totall. It simply doesn’t want to upgrade automatically. Any tips?
Some plugins update flawlessly for me and some don’t.
I’ve never successfully updated wordpress automatically before. I’ve done the steps above and still no luck. I’ve been told it depends on your host’s server settings. I have another host and everything updates fast and have had no errors.
I’ve not met this type of problem yet. I can easily upgrade plugins with one click from my dashboard. Great to see that there is a solution…