…Clueless

Since WordPress 2.8 “Baker” went gold today, I decided to immediately upgrade. I took the essential backups and hit the automatic upgrade link in the WordPress Dashboard. Voila! WordPress 2.8 was up and running in an instant and seemed perfectly bug free. The reality though, was different.

I decided to update some of my plugins as I got notifications that new versions were out. I clicked the link to update and was treated with the following error :

Downloading update from http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/YOURPLUGINHERE.zip.

Unpacking the update.

Incompatible archive PCLZIP_ERR_BAD_FORMAT (-10) : Invalid archive structure

I thought of it to be a random error, so I hit back and retried. Again, I got the error. I tried to install some new plugins via the Plugin Browser and got the same error. But if I uploaded the plugin archive file from my PC, it would install correctly. The Theme Browser showed no such errors and the themes were updated and new themes installed easily.

I headed over to the WordPress.org support forums and found that some users were indeed facing the same issue. Finally, I tweeted Ryan Boren, who was kind enough to immediately respond. Another user, demetris had already isolated the issue and filed a bug report.

The issue stands resolved now. Ryan has linked to a http.php in the support forum thread, which you will need to download and then overwrite the existing http.php in the wp-includes folder. The bug fix will be included in version 2.8.1. So, if you get errors while installing or upgrading plugins in WordPress 2.8 and cannot wait for the next release, kindly head over to the forum thread and follow the instructions. Another point to be noted here is that this issue does not effect all blogs. I have two blogs hosted on the same server and only one of them is affected by the bug.

Thanks again to Ryan Boren and demetris for being the heroes!

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