Updates Rant - Tired of broken sites after updates

Support
#1

Since 7 out of 10 times an X Theme update breaks a site to some degree can we do one of two things?

  1. Not push out releases through Wordpress Updates that are not considered near stable. These very beta update releases should live on Apex as a download for people who want to test.
  2. Add a note to the validation page that states what the current release is and what the stable release is like on the download page in Apex?

I am a long time X Theme user with many sites running X and Pro. I hold 22 licenses of this theme and have 15 more licenses that clients have purchased directly. This has been a long time issue with Theme.co that is not often present in other developer themes.

If this information is elsewhere, I suggest making some changes to make it more apparent to the user.

For example, I just updated a site to the latest version through a standard Wordpress update and it broke all images that were in a Cornerstone element. How does that happen? I don’t understand how an update gets pushed with such an oversight. If this was the first time it happened to me I would not be complaining. It’s been an issue for years with updates.

At the very least, test more and if a crazy bug exists, take it down and send an email to everybody.

I know that this was not simply an issue with one site as I reproduced the error with 3 other sites with the same results. It’s not a plugin conflict as I also tested with all plugins disabled except for Jetpack.

Still love X Theme and will continue using it. Just have to keep on learning what to watch out for with this theme.

I rolled back to 6.2.5 easily since I use a child theme. Lost about 30 minutes chasing down the problem assuming it was due to a plugin issue.

#2

Hey Jerad,

We’re sorry that you’re frustrated with the update issues. We have just updated our Update Guide which covers your concerns. It’s also listed in our Knowledge Base along with other important details.

Regarding the issue you mentioned, I don’t see a broken image bug listed in our issue tracker so this issue is most probably only happening in your setup. Is Jetpack installed in the sites having this issue? Please note that its Photon module is known to cause image issues. It’s best to try disconnecting the Photon module or service and test if the issue persists.

If the issue persists, it’s best that you copy your site to a staging server and do all updates there first and if you discover issues, you can give us WordPress Admin and FTP access of the staging site so we can troubleshoot. Below is a guide to setup a staging site.

Thanks.

#3

Thanks for the update. I use staging environments to prevent things like this from happening on live sites but you still lose a ton of time chasing down issues. I recognize that nothing is perfect and that there will always be some issues version to version, but if there are known issues with something as widely used as Jetpack, then you should not be pushing this as an update that shows up within the Wordpress updater. It should be a beta option only for testing and only downloadable from Apex. That is the longstanding issue I have with X Theme.

#4

Hey Jerad,

Thanks and it’s good to know that you’re using staging. I’ve mentioned in my previous reply that I’ve checked our issue tracker and there is no report specifically a conflict with Jetpack. We also have undergone internal beta testing, user beta testing, manual updates and eventually, automatic updates.

What I was saying about Jetpack is, it’s known to cause image issues. Maybe I should have added that it’s not just in X but is also known to cause issues or conflict with other themes and plugins as well. It might also depend on the exact setup you have. There might be a combination of settings in your site that the rest of the users have not used yet that is maybe why there is no report yet.

We have pushed an automatic update because we see that there are no critical reports. But, we are always happy to troubleshoot any update issues and in fact, our development team is quite quick to fix the reported update bugs as you can see in our Release Notes at https://theme.co/apex/forum/t/release-notes-pro-2-3-x-6-3-cornerstone-3-3/44607

I would just recommend that once you found an update issue in your staging site, you participate in reporting the issue so that our development team might uncover something from your setup.

We try very hard to beta test our products before releasing but it is even harder to replicate each and every WordPress setup especially conflicts with other plugins. That is why, there are still new issues and sometimes is only uncovered when all users update and that is only possible via automatic updates.

And with automatic updates, we do understand that non-technical users like clients might push the update link or button so I’d recommend that for your client sites, you disable automatic updates. If you don’t know yet, you can follow the link below which is a guide to do that. Just note that I don’t know your exact scenario but just giving you an idea.

Once you’ve tested the updates in staging, maybe you can enable the automatic updates in your client sites or send them a go signal to update.

I hope that information is useful.

#5

Thanks for the reply. I do have automatic updates turned off on sites that are more than basic features. I will submit any issues I find in the future.
Thanks so much!!

#6

You are most welcome.

#7

This topic was automatically closed 10 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.