The virus part is going to be off-topic, but yes a fresh install is the way to go. What I would do to upgrade the site is: Backup everything– PHP and database Install the old site on a development server. Before running the site, replace all of the core files with new 2.8 ones from … Read more
You need to… … have your files and folders owned by your user. If you have sudo privies with your SSH access this should be easy to accomplish. sudo chown -R user ./wordpress_directory … have your files and folders, at least the ones in wp-content, in the same group as the web server. Otherwise you … Read more
Considering that i) as @Tony Djukic put, “depends on how complicated the site is and how much of it is worth keeping around” ii) pain is something without an objective way of measuring iii) there will be some pain (and you acknowledge it). I say: just rip the Bandaid and go with option 2. Evaluate … Read more
A plugin was the cause of this issue, ‘PS Disable Auto Formatting‘. After disabling this plugin, the issue was fixed.
When a major release is made, fixes are made to it, but it’s rare that fixes to older versions are made. It has happened before, but it should never be relied upon, and there are a lot of bugfixes that are never backported. Sometimes a version will be tagged before a major release that isn’t … Read more
“the boring work of backup”… Backups may be boring, but they are essential and gives you a fallback position in case things go wrong. Without backups, you’re essentially playing Russian roulette with your site. It doesn’t even take very long, and reverting isn’t horrible or awful, it’s pretty easy. WP veterans take backups, test upgrades … Read more
If you site is live then you shouldn’t directly update that, although update in the recent version of wordpress is very easy and seemless but that wasn’t the case in 2.1 though. Also here is the list of steps that I will recommend you to take: Make the list of all plugins. Make sure none … Read more
You need to run the chown command on whole wp-content directory: chown www-data:www-data /path/to/wp-content/ -R
Configuration instructions in Codex on Enabling SSH Upgrade Access recommend either: Using SSH SFTP Updater Support plugin from official repository. Using built–in SSH2 support, which requires the PECL SSH2 extension installed on the server. It used to refer to this tutorial: Using SSH to Install/Upgrade in before, which might be of use.
The problem, it turns out, was that the db_version field in the wp_options table and the wp_db_version variable in the file /wp-includes/version.php didn’t match. In my case (an upgrade to 3.5.2) the database showed “22441” while the PHP file showed “22442”. Changing the number in the database to “22442” solved the issue. I’m not quite … Read more