This is a cautionary tale for anyone upgrading to Wordpress 2.7. Yesterday I was on Dean Hollands site and was reading about the fact that some of the information in his book about Worpress installation was out of date. Anyway after reading this it prompted me to upgrade my own blog, this is where my nightmare begins..

I went to my C-panel and pressed the big smiley face of Fantastico, so far so good. The system then informed me that an upgrade had been performed and that all the folders held within my blog had been saved, brilliant I thought. At this point I refreshed the page only to be greeted by every website owners worst nightmare, the dreaded ¨Fatal Error¨ message !

Blind panic set in at this point, I felt physically sick..

After trying to rationalize what the problem could be, in desperation I contacted the tech department at Hostgator . I opened a live chat browser and started to describe the problem but all the time being in such a panic my typing skills flew out of the window! I was greeted with a very cool, calm and collected guy from the Tech department who after deciphering my ramblings, immediately flew into action.

He prompted me for a few answers to very basic questions he posed, then disappeared for a few minutes. All the time I was waiting for him to reappear I was refreshing the page on my other computer. After the third attempt my site reappeared intact with no obvious problems. Upon questioning the Hostgator technician as to what the problem had been, it transpired that it was all down to an out of date plugin.

He advised me that for future upgrades of Wordpress, and I must stress here that it is crucially important to make sure that all your plugins are upgraded to the point that you can use them safely with the most recent upgraded version of Wordpress.

I cannot begin to describe to you how relieved I was to find my site intact. At the end of our live chat I was given the opportunity to rate his help. The five stars that were available to me didn´t even come close to my degree of satisfaction with this technical expertise and the cool, calm manner in which he dealt with me and my problem.

My advice to anyone who uses Wordpress is to have all your files backed up somewhere safely !