Gosh, I just love sharing my little blogging horror stories with you.
It's not my intention to scare you or dissuade you from blogging. I just want you to be aware of the mistakes that I've made, so you won't make them as well.
BTW, in case you don't know — before getting into affiliate marketing and blogging, I was an air traffic controller.
The most useful phrase I learned during that time was:
“Learn from the mistakes of others; you'll not live long enough to make them all yourself”.
Anyway, this little lesson comes from a WordPress upgrade that I completely botched.
All would have been fine had I bothered to stop, think and follow my own basic instructions — backup your blog prior to upgrading to the latest version of WordPress.
But after a number of successful automatic updates to other blogs, I ignored my own advice and just hit the “Click Here to Automatically Upgrade WordPress to latest Version ___” link on the AffiliateBloggerPRO member blog.
Initially, I saw nothing wrong with the blog's functionality, so I went on my merry way.
A couple of days later I realized what a mess I'd made.
Very few of the images were working. All those that had been uploaded via the WordPress administration to the wp-content/uploads/ folder were no longer linked correctly. In fact, some of the images had been deleted.
I started getting “Allowed memory size of 33554432” errors.
Page slugs and image names were changed… then things got worse.
One new member had somehow acquired ID #1, which had been mine. All my posts on both the blog and the BuddyPress forum were now attributed to that new member.
‘Members' refers to those members who joined through the Wishlist Member software, not as registered members via the WordPress interface.
And therein was the problem.
The Wishlist Member software is the crucial component in making that site run properly, and I hadn't checked the developer's site to make sure that it integrated with the WordPress update.
Had I bothered to do that, I would have seen that Stu and crew were still working to make the latest version of Wishlist Member integrate properly with the new WordPress.
And without a backup, I didn't have the option to roll back to the previous version of WordPress.
Aargh.
All in all, I wasted nearly a day getting the site back together.
So, you know what the lesson is … again … backup before upgrading!!!