Is there a Wordpress expert in the house?

October 6, 2008 4:54 PM

I've got a really odd problem after a failed upgrade last night. I was upgrading a site to the newest version with the Wordpress Auto Upgrade plugin. I have used that plugin in the past with the site without issue. Last night it completed the preliminary checks and reported all was ok, and then when I clicked to begin upgrade it threw me back to the index page. And now I can not get to any admin page.

When I click the login link, or try to go to any admin page, the site serves up the main index page and the URL is weird. For example, the login URL is http://example.com/blog/wp-login.php. However, clicking on that results in getting the main page and the URL shows as http://example.com/blog/wp-login.php/. Obviously, there is no directory named wp-login.php on the site. I have no idea where that is coming from.

Stuff I tried so far...

1. Completed upgrade via ftp. It made no difference
2. I've checked for rogue .htaccess files that could be redirecting - don't see anything
3. Checked wp-config.php - it looks fine.
4. Checked dB options table for unusual entries - it all looks fine.
5. Checked theme directory - no files were changed yesterday.
6. Deleted WPAU directory from plug-ins folder.

I haven't got anything useful from the Wordpress.org forums yet, so I'm trying here. I know I can just wipe the site and start over with a backup of the dB, but that would be admitting defeat. And I'm not ready to do that yet.

Does anybody have any ideas?

posted by COD to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Backup your third party plugins, then delete them from the plugins folder. Then try to login again.

WPAU is great, when it works. It has gotten better in recent versions, but it can still be a pain.

//I wish WP would just add auto-updating.
posted by Wild_Eep at 6:11 PM on October 6, 2008

Isn't the login page located at http://example.com/blog/wp-admin/ ?
posted by mdavis1982 at 7:54 PM on October 6, 2008

That would get you there too - on a properly working site. On my site, that URL also gets you the main index page.
posted by COD at 8:09 PM on October 6, 2008

Deleting all the plug ins did not make a difference.
posted by COD at 8:15 PM on October 6, 2008

WPAU makes a backup of the index.html file in the example/com/blog directory called (I think) index.htm.bak. Try renaming it to index.htm?
posted by Solomon at 11:20 PM on October 6, 2008

Can you try moving everything but wp-content and wp-config.php to another directory (such as "old"), renaming /plugins and then re-uploading everything else? (backing up the db first would be a good idea just in case).
posted by Hanni at 2:40 AM on October 7, 2008

Now that I fixed it I thought I would put the solution here in case somebody else end up here with the same problem.

Wordpress Auto Update apparently did two things that hoarked my site. It put a .htaccess file in the root public_html directory that was causing the weird redirect, and it changed the permissions on the entire /blog directory to 777. When I blew away the .htaccess file I started getting error messages trying to access the log in screen. The error log indicated that WP didn't like the permissions, so I changed it back to 755 and all is well.

I won't be using WPAU anymore though. Something that blows up site up that bad on failure is not something I want to deal with.

Thanks for the attempts at helping.
posted by COD at 2:04 PM on October 8, 2008