Got a WordPress site stuck on “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance.” Or the “Another Update is Currently in Progress” error message? Fear not there’s an easy solution to solve these issues. To set the stage, you've just performed an a WordPress update via Dashboard. Only to have site stuck in maintenance mode or the update failed and now your WordPress core is now update locked, while also stuck in maintenance mode.

When you perform any update on WordPress via the dashboard. WordPress will put itself into maintenance mode. Displaying a page with the following message: “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute”. Afterwards, when update is completed, maintenance mode would be disabled.

If maintenance mode persists, after the update. The obvious fix for this is to go and delete the .maintenance file yourself, its located in the root of your WordPress directory. If you updated multiple plugin/themes at the same time and either of them failed. WordPress would display the following error: “Another Update is Currently in Progress” after you delete .maintenance or the other way around vice versa. In which case you’ll have to journey into the database to delete the following entry using this SQL statement:
delete from wp_options where option_name='core_updater.lock';

Some precaution that can be taken to prevent this from happening:

• Check compatibility of plugins/themes. Before updating
• Update things one at a time.
• Check the directory permissions are set correctly on LUNIX/UNIX it should be 755.

That's all cheers!!

Tags:Quick Fixes, WordPress, WordPress fixes