January 31, 2012 – we’ve found the culprit – the W3 Total Cache plugin. As of this writing, it’s still not playing well with 3.3 or 3.3.1, and hasn’t been updated since last August. So if you’re NOT running that plugin, you should be able to upgrade safely. However – the caution in upgrading WordPress the MINUTE it comes out remains – give your hard-working plugin developers a couple of weeks to catch up. The more plugins you run, the more likely there is to be a problem.

Hi folks, you may have gotten an email today (Monday, December 12) about the shiny new features in WordPress 3.3.

Don’t hit that upgrade button just yet!

One of my top clients, who shall remain nameless (seriously), got all excited and hit that link and bad things happened. HostGator chuckled and said, “yep, that version appears to be buggy.” And downgraded my client so his site worked again. I love HostGator tech support. I owe them all a pitcher of beer.

Our typical modus operandi here in the Rowboat is to wait about 3 weeks when big new releases come out before upgrading, to give plugin developers and webhosts a chance to catch up and let the REST of the world be the beta testers. So if you’re WebMistress clients, that’s why you see that upgrade link nagging you for a while before our team gets to it. That’s on purpose.

Be careful out there!