Jetpack update breaks WordPress 3.5
Jetpack, the popular stats plugin for WordPress, has released several updates recently. The latest, which came yesterday, January 6th, brought an unwelcome gift for those who have upgraded to the recent WordPress 3.5 platform. The latest version of Jetpack, 2.1.1, disables some key functionality within WordPress -- namely the ability to add media.
Users who upgraded were surprised when attempting to edit a new post. When clicking the "Add Media" button, which WordPress added in version 3.5, nothing happens. Nothing at all. No error message, no continuous running. Just nothing.
While it took a little while, as the day went on the WordPress support forums began lighting up with customers demanding to know what had happened to their beloved content management system. This is not the first WordPress 3.5 problem either. Previously another plugin, Bulletproof Security, caused some issues upon upgrade. In fact, that one was even tougher to fix, involving FTPing into a site to remove HTaccess from the WP installation.
The problem caused by Jetpack will prove somewhat easier to fix. Initially I attempted to disable the plugin, as it was the only update that occurred before the problem reared its head. That did not solve the issue.
However today, one clever user on the WordPress forums -- paulbienkowski -- found that you not only need to disable Jetpack, but also do a reinstall of WordPress 3.5 in order to solve this problem. Meanwhile, another user also reports that, in addition to "Add Media", the update also broke the linking. Still another poster said that enabling Jetpack, but not connecting it to WordPress.com, would get everything working again.
So far there has been no mention of any of this on the Jetpack web site, at least as far as I could find. However, the developers are usually on top of these things, so I would expect a fix to be coming within the next day or two. For now, all you can do is follow what I have outlined above.
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Every report of breakage in 3.5 so far has been traced back to another plugin doing something it shouldn’t, like manually loading old versions of jQuery libaries.
In the paulbienkowski thread alone, three different plugins (CevherLike Facebook Like Popup Plugin, Simple Slideshow, and Find Me Elsewhere) were found to be responsible for the breakage, not Jetpack.
If you have any reports WordPress 3.5 breaking with only Jetpack installed, please do report it in the support forum: http://wordpress.org/support/plugin/jetpack Until then, you may want to update your post title.
Thanks for the heads up mate!
@Pablo, Martin has done that before, for example https://www.ghacks.net/2012/03/07/ghacks-net-wordpress-plugin-list/
Martin, I think it’d be interesting if you wrote an article (or two) enumerating the WordPress plugins you’re currently using on Ghacks, and a short description of each one.
I was just about to update but saw your post. Now I am waiting for more response before updating my plugin. Should I update or wait?
I updated mine, and got a 500 internal error. Removing jetpack restores my site. I like using jetpack. Oh well will have to wait for further updates and see if it fixes it. Thanks for this article.
Mine’s working fine (touch wood). Three blogs all on 3.5 with JetPack 2.1.1, so I guess there must be something else involved.