Case I

So this was, on the surface, a real disaster. Went to look at my Blogs and decide what to add today – and the response from WordPress was –  ‘Oops! That page can’t be found’.

Now given that I am self-hosting and not that familiar with WordPress that was a bit of a worry. The good news was that all the blogs were listed on the Admin Page, and all the WordPress links were there and active. I could log-in to the site and once logged in the posts were all there and intact. Looked on the Server and everything seemed to be in the correct location. So it looked like a configuration issue.

Now Google is usually your friend, the problem was when I Googled this issue all the links were about people using the WordPress service direct, or using it through their respective ISPs.  Eventually though did manage to get an idea that it could be caused by the index.php file no longer being found.

Well that file was there and in the correct location. Then I remembered that yesterday I was looking at the Settings>General and changed the Web Site url home page from quintic.co.uk/blogs to just quintic.co.uk. That was the problem. As far as I can tell I did follow the instructions correctly, and whilst the main site did display correctly, and I could log-in and execute all admin functions, the Blog posts would not display. Still don’t know what the issue was, but I have reset the url and all is fine. That will have to do for now.

Update: All is not fine. The blog is listing as one continuous blog. If I click on the individual links though, it comes up page not found. Strange. When editing the blogs presented individually. When viewing though that does not seem to be the case.

Case II

A second case of No Blogs –  Only this one was worse. No WordPress access at all!. WordPress could not access the database.The initial issue was the blog link on the Header bar stopped working. The error being reported was a “500 – Server Error”. Not a lot of help. Luckily, in the browser history, there was a link to wp-admin, and this reported WordPress could not access the database. Now this was worrying because:

1. I had just uploaded a new version of the web site from the Windows env.
2. I had added my own tables to the MySQL database
3. I had updated the user profiles to match those of the Windows env.

and I had no idea which of the above had caused the problem – if any.

However ‘Panic Not’ as  Frankie Howerd would have said. Google is your friend. It pointed me to the wp-config.php file, which details the User and Password used by WordPress. That was when I discovered the problem. We have two sets of Users.

1. MySQL Users
2. WordPress Users

To keep things simple (and indeed I thought required) I made the user names the same. However the passwords were subtly different. I had manually changed the passwords on the MySQL accounts to match those of the WordPress accounts, but that change was not reflected in the wp-config.php file. Once reverted, and my own php files updated to reflect the correct passwords all was OK.