Hi everyone.
First things first: this was indeed a bug in WordPress Toolkit. It really sucks that it happened and we're truly sorry about it. It was obviously not our intention -- we're actively using WPT for our own pet projects, and we
definitely don't want stuff like that to happen. We're always taking extra care to make sure customer websites are not negatively affected by WPT updates. Unfortunately, not all issues can be found during the testing -- read on below for details.
Despite several people reporting the issue, our team had to spent quite a lot of time today trying to reproduce this bug internally before finally succeeding. Here's how you can encounter it:
1. Install a Plesk license that has full-featured WordPress Toolkit (trial license will also do) -- otherwise you won't be able to do step #3.
2. Install WordPress.
3. Enable and disable Maintenance Mode via WPT at least once (this creates maintenance.php file with the corresponding assets in a separate directory).
4. Install a Plesk license that doesn't have the full-featured WordPress Toolkit.
5. Wait until a new major WP version -- 5.1 in our case -- is released (major update is required, as minor updates won't trigger the bug).
6. Wait until WordPress Toolkit checks for the availability of updates.
7.
Profit! Bug happens.
Note: the bug only exists in the WordPress Toolkit v3.6, which was released a couple of hours before WP 5.1, so very unlucky timing for us.
As you can see, this isn't a particularly popular or straightforward case, so we've missed it. Based on our support ticket analysis, only a small number of people were affected (thankfully), but even so, we're treating this issue very seriously (it's not the size, y'know). Here's what we're doing:
- WPT 3.6.1 release on Saturday disabled all WPT 3.6 code, including the code responsible for this bug, until we have a proper fix.
- WPT 3.6.2 release (tomorrow, if nothing goes wrong) will enable all WPT 3.6 code back, immediately applying a proper fix for the bug we're discussing here.
- To prevent things like this from happening in the future (and to make it up to the unfortunate users who were affected by the bug), we're also making Maintenance Mode management free for Web Admin edition and all similar editions.
Hope this helps -- let me know if you have any questions or comments. Sorry, guys.
PS. I'm quite unhappy about this personally, so I'll do an RCA/postmortem with the team to understand how this happened and what we can do to ensure stuff like this won't happen again.
PPS. For the author of
this tweet: dude, I don't know if you're reading this, but we're sorry and the fix is incoming. I just wanted to say that your tweet had our team rolling on the floor laughing -- some of them are actually asking me to make a "buy now bitch" T-shirt for the whole team. I don't think I've actually promised them to do it, but since they're reading this too, you've kinda put me in a precarious position...
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