As though a global pandemic isn’t enough, a new global problem occurred overnight, that affects your WordPress website. Version 5.5 rolled out across the world last night, like the Bubonic Plague. For folks with auto-update running, this is old news. Your website already has been updated to (and possibly broken by) 5.5.
We became aware of issues early this morning and have been madly contacting vendors, conversing with others in forums, trying to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.
The environment of each WordPress site is so different from another, so there can be multiple things wrong at once. What fixes the issue for one site, won’t work in another. Across the sites we have worked on today, we have not found one single fix. On some sites, deactivating one or more plugins had us going again, but on some sites, no bueno.
Rumor Has It
There is a lot of chatter online that all you need to do is download and install the official WordPress plugin: Enable jQuery Migrate Helper. The plugin’s description on Github highlights the issue:
“With the update to WordPress 5.5, a migration tool known as jquery-migrate will no longer be enabled by default. This may lead to unexpected behaviors in some themes or plugins who run older code. This plugin serves as a temporary solution, enabling the migration script for your site to give your plugin and theme authors some more time to update, and test, their code.”
However, we are still hearing lots of people saying that that didn’t fix all of their issues.
#1 Important Note – If you don’t read anything else, read this!!
Don’t do ANYTHING in your back-end right now. Please. Don’t run updates, don’t try to edit pages, don’t add posts. Don’t add or delete plugins. We don’t want your site to break on the front end.
The Good News
As far as we can tell so far, this doesn’t affect the front end of your site, as much as the back-end, but do me a favor, okay? Take a look through your site right now and make sure that is the case. If not, please contact us with the URL of the page that is broken so we can address the issue.
The Bad News
Even if you use the plugin mentioned above, it is a temporary fix. At this point, it looks like we may be at the mercy of WordPress to roll out a new (fixed) version. At this point, they are all on Xanax, working 24 hours a day to fix this. Aren’t we all glad we aren’t the coders who released the poo that hit the fan today? That’s something, anyway.
The Here & Now News
So, what should you do (after you don’t do the things we told you not to do above)?
That really depends on so many factors, like:
- Did you have auto-update on last night?
- Did you update manually today?
- What theme and plugins you have installed.
So, because this is so important, we’d like to ask you to sit back, sip a Mai Tai, and we will put on our capes and save the world (if it’s all the same to you).
Your Options
- Go in unattended and blow up your site. (refer to above)
- Let’s us go in and see what’s going on currently with your site.
- If your site hasn’t been updated yet, let us stop future updates for now.
- If your site didn’t practice social distancing with 5.5, let us roll it back to the previous version and stop updates for now.
