I use Dreamhost for hosting all of my sites. They offer something awesome called “one-click installs“. If you’ve installed any of the software that they offer to install for you, you can upgrade that software with the click of a button. I’ve upgraded my blog several times using that method. Usually it is painless and I don’t have to do anything other than wait for the emails saying that the upgrade was complete. This time was different.

I was getting an error that said that something was being redefined and that you couldn’t do that. I can’t remember the exact error message. When the one click installer is performing an upgrade, a copy of the currently installed software is created in a new directory on the server. I deleted the directory that the WordPress software was installed in and restored the previous version (by renaming the newly created directory). What I expected to happen was that my blog would be back to normal. Nope. I was still getting the same error. So I tried deleting my cache and refreshing again. Nope, still didn’t work, still getting the same error.

I wasn’t sure what to do next. I reasoned that surely the WordPress development team wouldn’t release something with such a blatant error in it and the only other code that is executed would be the plugins. Since I couldn’t get a view of my blog, I couldn’t deactivate any of the plugins; I had to delete them. I made a backup of my plugins folder and deleted every plugin in the folder.

It turned out that I was using an old version of the LiveJournal Crossposter plugin. I updated that and that fixed the issue. Problem solved…finally.