Undefined _weak_escape(), Redirection, and the WordPress 2.8 Upgrade

Posted on June 12, 2009, 2:38 pm, by jamiegrove, under Wordpress.

If you upgraded to WordPress 2.8 and ended up with an error like this…


Fatal error: Call to undefined method WordPress_Module::_weak_escape() in ../wp-includes/wp-db.php

Chances are you have the Redirection plugin. Anything prior to version 2.1.14 will throw this error when you upgrade. Of course, it would have been nice if you upgraded the plugin prior to upgrading WordPress, but you didn’t do that… did you?

I didn’t either. :)

No worries. The solution is simple enough:

  1. Rename the /wp-content/plugins/redirection directory to /wp-content/plugins/redirection-bad (or something like that) – This will cause WordPress to disable the plugin.
  2. You should be able to log into the WP admin now.
  3. Go to Plugins in the WP admin and confirm that the Redirection plugin is disabled.
  4. Change the /wp-content/plugins/redirection-bad back to /wp-content/plugins/redirection.
  5. Refresh the Plugins page in the WP admin.
  6. You should be able to use the automatic upgrade now on the Redirection plugin.

If you have other blogs to upgrade, try upgrading the plugin first… unless you like this sort of thing. :)

8 Comments

  1. john says:
    June 12, 2009 at 5:14 pm

    Thanks – it fixed my problem with this

    Cheers

  2. claus says:
    June 14, 2009 at 4:55 am

    thanks, worked for me too!

    greetz

  3. Christopher Shennan says:
    June 20, 2009 at 1:56 pm

    I have 2 sites running WordPress and on one I upgraded the plugins before upgrading to WordPress 2.8 and this site worked perfectly. On the other site I upgraded to WordPress 2.8 before upgrading the plugins and I got the error mentioned above.

    Thanks for the fix… this got my second site back up and running with 5 minutes.

    Many Thanks.

  4. Robert Brown says:
    June 25, 2009 at 5:57 pm

    You are an angel of the highest order for this, thank you!

  5. Tonny says:
    July 8, 2009 at 4:25 pm

    Thanks. Saved my day :) :):) We are lucky having people finding out stuff like this for us :)
    Tonny’ s last blog ..Hvorfor fjerner dere info om svindel My ComLuv Profile

  6. Dave says:
    July 12, 2009 at 2:01 pm

    You SAVED me!!! Thanks so much!

  7. Rob says:
    August 14, 2009 at 2:02 pm

    THANK YOU !!!!!!!!!!!!!! U R THE MAN

  8. nick says:
    September 14, 2009 at 11:18 pm

    Thanks so much for offering this post … It saved my life

    Nick

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