Wordpress, please stop 404ing me. Please?

September 5, 2010 5:52 PM

My Wordpress installation is giving me a 404 error whenever I try to access /wp-admin/, or any of the files and folders within. The front page of the site, and all files in the root, including individual posts, work fine. However, it is difficult to maintain a blog without dashboard access. Any ideas?

First, in case this helps, the blog url: http://cornerbrooker.com. I can access http://cornerbrooker.com/wp-login.php, but once logged in and attempting to get to cornerbrooker.com/wp-admin/, I get a 404.

Second, I've done some Googling and this seems to be a relatively common problem but none of the offered solutions have worked. Here's what I've tried:

- creating a new .htaccess file
- uploading a fresh copy of the wp-admin folder and it's contents
- disabling all plug-ins by renaming the plugins folder
- ensuring correct file permissions

If you have any suggestions, I'm all ears. If you think that more information would help, please let me know!

posted by tomcochrane to Computers & Internet (14 answers total)

Is your browser somehow blocking cookies, or the ones you have are causing problems? Try replacing the block of keys in the wp-config.php with new ones?

Or perhaps an issue with PHP sessions on your host? Put a phpinfo file in your webroot and check the session.save variables, and perhaps register_globals too?
posted by holgate at 6:02 PM on September 5, 2010

Try this:

http://cornerbrooker.com/wp-login.php?redirect_to=http://cornerbrooker.com/wp-admin/index.php&reauth=1

or specifically this (which redirects to above):
http://cornerbrooker.com/wp-admin/index.php

It looks like index.php is not set in for your DirectoryIndex

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_dir.html
posted by bitdamaged at 6:29 PM on September 5, 2010

I'm not sure why this isn't working but putting a .htaccess file in wp-admin directory with just:

DirectoryIndex index.html index.php

Should fix this.
posted by bitdamaged at 6:30 PM on September 5, 2010

Response by poster: If it helps, this hasn't happened before. The site has been active for about three months with no troubles, but when I tried to log in on Friday, this happened.
posted by tomcochrane at 7:40 PM on September 5, 2010

Response by poster: @bitdamaged:

Thanks, but I tried adding the .htaccess file and it didn't change anything.

@holgate:

I know that it's not just my browser, unfortunately. I don't know much about what you mentioned in your second paragraph though. Could you explain a little more?
posted by tomcochrane at 7:42 PM on September 5, 2010

If it helps, this hasn't happened before.

It could be that your host recently updated the server's version of PHP, or tweaked its default Apache settings.

To explain a little more: follow these instructions on creating a phpinfo file, or see if cPanel has a category set up to give you the PHP version and information for the site.
posted by holgate at 8:19 PM on September 5, 2010

Just in checking, /wp-admin/ went to the login page, so something is registering properly. Could you try (these are just a couple I have used recently) /wp-admin/plugins.php or /wp-admin/options-general.php ? The default index page (or lack thereof) shouldn't impact those.
posted by Pronoiac at 10:26 PM on September 5, 2010

I have recently had the same problems with my wordpress site and clearing my browser's cache, history, cookies, and whatnot, seemed to work. I don't know why it works, but it's happened 3 times and somehow doing this makes the browser gods happy. YMMV.
posted by shazzam! at 11:36 PM on September 5, 2010

Response by poster: @hades:

I'm doing everything via ftp.

The .htaccess file reads as follows:

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress


@Pronoiac:

Both /wp-admin/plugins.php and /wp-admin/options-general.php lead to the 404 error.
posted by tomcochrane at 4:53 AM on September 6, 2010

Response by poster: @holgate:

I created a phpinfo file. It is located at http://cornerbrooker.com/phpinfo.php. I'm not sure about a lot of what is listed, but interesting to note that the Build Date is Sep 2 2010 16:31:57. I started having problems the following morning.
posted by tomcochrane at 4:58 AM on September 6, 2010

http://cornerbrooker.com/wp-login.php is your login page, and looks wrong because your styles are missing ( http://cornerbrooker.com/wp-admin/css/login.css and http://cornerbrooker.com/wp-admin/css/colors-fresh.css ). In your webroot, do you have a wp-admin directory? and inside that, do you have a css directory? And inside that login.css and colors-fresh.css files inside that that have world-readable permissions, and they have content in them?

I have seen files appear to be uploaded correctly but actually are "fake" there because of FTP client problems, or right at the limit of max filesystem usage.

If you have the hierarchy above for those css files, visible and not with zero-length, I'd be contacting my hosting company support and saying: "I have file a file wp-admin/css/login.css file, that is reporting as not found in my browser. Help?"
posted by artlung at 9:20 AM on September 6, 2010

I'd go with artlung's suggestion, and definitely give your hosting support: the recompile/upgrade of PHP isn't coincidental here. Do you have PHP error logging set up with your host?

I don't see anything in the phpinfo, though 5.2.9 is slightly lower than I'd expect -- 5.2.12 and above is more common in hosts that haven't made the leap to 5.3.x. There are a few Wordpress bugs associated with 5.2.9: one's related to the PCRE extension, but I don't think it's that.
posted by holgate at 10:47 AM on September 6, 2010

Response by poster: I think we've come to the conclusion that there is some sort of incompatibility between the version of PHP that the server is using and the version of Wordpress we were using. We've downgraded our Wordpress installation and everything seems to be working well so far.

Thanks for your help everyone.
posted by tomcochrane at 6:46 AM on September 7, 2010

Downgrading WordPress was the fix? That is a bad sign for the long term security of your website. Older versions of WordPress get superseded by new ones, particularly because of security problems in some older versions. Many of the older ones have security vulnerabilities that make them liable to be overtaken by spam injection or worse. You also will be looking at limitations in the usage of plugins or themes.

If I were you, I would be investigating alternative web hosts that can keep up with the state of the art.
posted by artlung at 8:27 AM on September 7, 2010