Well, I took the plunge and wiped both sites, creating fresh databases and installing WordPress from scratch. I kept the default wp-content folder name and database table names. One site has the security plugins, but the other site has nothing but some freshly created pages, a modified theme, Advanced Automatic Updates and an outdated Facebook plugin copied to the plugins folder by FTP.
I also copied the Facebook plugin folder to one of my working sites, and it updated it in no time. I also realised that that site had a modified table name that clearly wasn’t causing any problems.
However, the two broken sites simply refuse to automatically run the update. I ran the Background Update Tester and it was perfectly satisfied that everything was fine. I don’t really have anything else to isolate, unless this plugin can actually be affected by customised themes.
My best guess is that the hosting server or CPanel is configured in some way that this plugin just doesn’t like. All my working sites are through a different host that I much prefer, but I have no control over where these ones are hosted. That said, this plugin did work on these sites prior to 20/9/13, going by my email records.
I’m open to any suggestions at this point 🙁 These sites get attacked way too much to not keep updated.
Good news! I received an email this morning telling me one of the sites updated last night! I don’t think I changed anything yesterday (except giving both sites a random table prefix again), so it was a little bit delayed, but as far as I can tell, it has one relevant difference over the site that did not. At the end of the wp-config.php file, I inserted this code:
/**Sets up 'direct method for wordpress autoupdate, without FTP */
define('FS_METHOD','direct');
I got the advice from this site, although I was not actually using FTP to update. I haven’t used anything else from that page since changing the FTP permissions broke my whole site.
I can’t say for sure if this is what fixed it, but I’m making the change to the remaining site and will advise if it also updates.
Well, that didn’t work. I manually added in the WordPress commands into wp-config and that didn’t do anything either, so I have no reason to believe that Advanced Automatic Updates is in any way the issue here. Closing the thread.
