Kau-Boys

Updating WordPress and it’s plugins and themes is usually straightforward. You navigate to the “Dashboard | Updates” and update the components. If an error happens while updating WordPress Core or plugins/themes, WordPress can usually handle this and roll back, but sometimes things go wrong.

Failed updates break the site

If the update fails, your site might end up being broken. In this case, you will probably get the following message:

Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.

When WordPress performs updates for core (or multiple plugins), it will enable a maintenance mode and inserts a lock into the database.

Repairing the site

The two locks will be automatically removed after 15 minutes. As it will not only break the backend, but also the frontend of your site, you probably don’t want to wait 15 minutes.

Deactivating the maintenance mode

The first thing you can do is searching for the file .maintenance file in the root folder of your WordPress installation. This file contains a single line of PHP code with the UNIX timestamp on when the installation process of the update started:

<?php $upgrading = 1648994440; ?>

If you delete this file, the message will disappear and WordPress will show the frontend and backend of your site again.

Resuming the previous update

Even after removing the .maintenance file, you can’t continue updating WordPress core. If you try to update it right away, you will probably see the following message:

Another update is currently in progress.

This is caused by the core_updater.lock option WordPress sets when starting the core update process:

$ wp option get core_updater.lock
1648994423

As you can see, it has a slightly earlier time (it’s set before the ZIP is being downloaded and extracted). When you are sure that the previous core update process really stopped, you can remove this option either using a database management tool or with the WP-CLI:

$ wp option delete core_updater.lock
Success: Deleted 'core_updater.lock' option.

Now you should be able to restart the update process, this time hopefully without an error causing your site to break again.

Conclusion

While WordPress updates usually don’t cause issues and run quite smoothly, an error can always happen. In these cases, you should know how to quickly get your site working again and not having it broken for 15 minutes.

When developing projects, I often use Custom Post Types (CPT). In a new project, the content of the entries were build completely with core blocks. In the past, I typically used custom meta fields and a fixed page template. But as creating such a complex content of a CPT is quite a lot of work and error-prone, I wanted to use a template for new entries.

Creating a block pattern

The easiest way to create a pattern for a post type is by creating the content first using the block editor and then exporting the HTML markup using the “Copy all content” option:

Now you can use this markup to register a block pattern with the default content of new entries:

function cpt_register_block_pattern() {
	register_block_pattern(
		'my-cpt/my-cpt-pattern',
		array(
			'title'       => __( 'My CPT pattern', 'my-cpt' ),
			'description' => _x( 'The custom template for my_cpt', 'Block pattern description', 'my-cpt' ),
			'content'     => '
<!-- wp:paragraph {"placeholder":"Custom Post Type ..."} -->
<p></p>
<!-- /wp:paragraph -->

<!-- wp:columns -->
<div class="wp-block-columns"><!-- wp:column -->
<div class="wp-block-column"><!-- wp:image -->
<figure class="wp-block-image"><img alt=""/></figure>
<!-- /wp:image --></div>
<!-- /wp:column -->

<!-- wp:column -->
<div class="wp-block-column"><!-- wp:heading {"placeholder":"Name ..."} -->
<h2></h2>
<!-- /wp:heading -->

<!-- wp:paragraph {"placeholder":"Phone ..."} -->
<p></p>
<!-- /wp:paragraph --></div>
<!-- /wp:column --></div>
<!-- /wp:columns -->',
		)
	);
}
add_action( 'init', 'cpt_register_block_pattern' );

Creating a template for new entries

When registering a new CPT, you can can also create default content by passing a template argument with a multidimensional array defining the template:

function cpt_register_post_type() {
	register_post_type(
		'my_cpt',
		array(
			'label'                 => __( 'Custom Post Type', 'my-cpt' ),
			'supports'              => array( 'title', 'editor' ),
			'public'                => true,
			'show_ui'               => true,
			// ... other settings
			'has_archive'           => true,
			'show_in_rest'          => true,
			'template'              => array(
				array(
					'core/paragraph',
					array(
						'placeholder' => __( 'Custom Post Type ...', 'my-cpt' ),
					),
				),
				array(
					'core/columns',
					array(),
					array(
						array(
							'core/column',
							array(),
							array(
								array(
									'core/image',
								),
							),
						),
						array(
							'core/column',
							array(),
							array(
								array(
									'core/heading',
									array(
										'level'       => 2,
										'placeholder' => __( 'Name ...', 'my-cpt' ),
									),
								),
								array(
									'core/paragraph',
									array(
										'placeholder' => __( 'Phone ...', 'my-cpt' ),
									),
								),
							),
						),
					),
				),
			),
		)
	);
}
add_action( 'init', 'cpt_register_post_type' );

As you can see in this little example, the array can get very complex, unreadable and hard to maintain. You would also have to convert the Block Pattern HTML to this PHP array format. So any change to the pattern would require you to do the work twice, trying not to make any mistake.

Combining Block Patterns and Custom Post Types templates

As the solution with the PHP array was not really something I wanted to use (the actual template was a lot more complex than the one shown in the example), I first tried the following:

// ...
'template'              => array(
	array(
		'my-cpt/my-cpt-pattern',
	),
),
// ...

I thought, that maybe the template can also use Block Patterns in the array and not only blocks. But this didn’t work. When searching for a solution, I found multiple issues on GitHub. There I found the core/pattern block, which makes the task very easy:

'template'              => array(
	array(
		'core/pattern',
		array(
			'slug' => 'my-cpt/my-cpt-pattern',
		),
	),
),

Unfortunately, the core/pattern block is not available in WordPress 5.8, but you can already use it with the Gutenberg plugin installed and activated. I really hope that it’s going to be available with WordPress 5.9 expected next month.

Conclusion

Both Block Patterns and templates for new Custom Post Type entries are really helpful. Combining them with the new core/pattern block can really increase usability a lot.