I almost had success with the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin (WPAU).  Everything seemed to work, right up to the point of putting the site in maintenance mode.  But try as I might, even with a manual “.maintenance” file it would always fail.  Searched high and low, and came across several folks having similar (and different) upgrade woes.  Some posts indicated the WPAU plugin was ‘outdated’ and no longer necessary since WordPress offers the functionality built-in.  But, previously that hadn’t worked for me.

I tried most of the solutions, which had varying levels of success for the folks posting to forums and blogs.  Finally came across one solution, which looked so simple, I couldn’t hurt by trying.  Check out Fred Palma’s easy solution. It simply entails changing the owner and group to be ‘owned’ by the web server itself.  On my server, I made one small change, that being that the owner and group are “www” instead of Fred’s “www-data” since I was familiar with that owner/group on installation.

Next, I had to figure out the correct settings for the WordPress routine.  There were only a few things to configure, but try as I might, using the server name (or variations) would always fail.  Searching for those failure messages landed me on a support forum post that indicated the individual had entered “localhost” as the server name.  Something obscure indicated the server couldn’t connect to itself and this might be a possible solution.  Sure enough, it worked, with the proper username/password credentials.

The update to 2.8.1 was painless, once everything was configured properly.  Now I have to go back and clean up file permissions and other messes I made. I’ll delete the WPAU plugin and perform a general review to make sure we’re all up and running properly, as well.