Update now? Sounds more like button for WP update than a plugin.

And the maintenance mode thing implies that the wp updater died at some point or was prematurely stopped as that is what it is designed to do.

In your plugins folder on server do you have a simple press folder? Does it have all files in it? Is it listed on the plugins admin panel.

The wp updater or your interruption may have been between wp removing old version and unzipping new version.

If the plugin is gone or corrupted, you could just download the plugin again and upload with ftp and then upgrade.

But see if plugin still there or not.

Since the site was down and I couldn’t get to the dashboard, I couldn’t remember the exact terminology, but I had clicked on the update for SP when it happened.

I’ll see what I can find.

Would be good to find out what the interruption was. Another admin doing maintenance? Your hosting?

Tried to do the WP update again and now the entire site is down.

My dev suggested calling the host, so I’ll do that now.  This is his report –

a .maintenance file in the root that was last modified about 15min ago. and I’m seeing a server 500 error and no error logs. so right now, it’s not just the forums, the whole site is down. 

Andy, when wp updates core, plugins or themes, it puts the wp install in maintenance mode. If something goes wrong, you have to manually remove the maintenance mode file or wp does when it times out.

That’s the file wp puts in place when it starts updating anything. Then removes it when done. If it’s not removing something going wrong on update. Just remove the file and site will come back.

But would something wrong in update. Perhaps cannot remove old dir? Or running out of memory.

Called our host and they can’t do much other than providing error logs, so I asked them to do a restore from yesterday.  Didn’t know what else to do since I can’t get anywhere.

Mr Papa said
That’s the file wp puts in place when it starts updating anything. Then removes it when done. If it’s not removing something going wrong on update. Just remove the file and site will come back.

But would something wrong in update. Perhaps cannot remove old dir? Or running out of memory.

They asked me to take a look at it.
It looks like for some reason they are getting random 500 server errors.  First they tried an SP update. The update only went about 1/2 through adding files to /simple-press then died for some reason.

Then they tried updating to WP 3.5 and it did the same. It left .maintenance up but only about 1/2 the WP files were added.

We had to completely delete WP and all the stranded WP files in /update then manually update it to 3.5. That got the site up.

We then manually added their original SP version 5.1.4 back and now forums are back online.

So site is up but still getting random 500 errors in both frt and back end that needs investigated before moving forward.

All I can say is ‘Thank goodness for Brandon!’  You have a jewel there. 

I can’t tell you how much we appreciate his willingness to help.

glad progress is made…  I would get the host in on those 500 errors then we can try the sp update again..