WordPress maintenance mode fix

Ok, so you made the upgrade to WordPress 3.0. Now your website is Stuck in Maintenance Mode. I’m not going to talk about the whole update process. If you have made it to this point, you know how to update and you just want that maintenance hold page gone.

There is a “.maintenance” file in the root folder of your wordpress site. You can go through your webhosting control panel, and hopefully the view will let you see hidden files. The other way to get to this file is through FTP. Most FTP clients will let you enable hidden files. By default this is off, so you won’t see a .maintenance file when you first look. Find the view from the file menu, and choose show hidden files. The FTP clients that are pretty good about this are Transmit, Cyberduck, and WinSCP. I bet SmartFTP has a simple way to enable it as well.

Just delete that .maintenance and your front page should re-appear. If the update failed, you will have to run the updater again. Sometimes turning off your plugins will help. You may even find a php error that tells you one plugin isn’t working. Thats the next thing to dig into.