Ever had one of those weeks when everything you try seems to turn out wrong? Well, some things anyway. I’ve had one of those weeks and I want to share about it to help you prevent any of the problems I’ve had.
Let me outline what problems I was having:
- Login problems for a client’s blog – it just wouldn’t view the wp-admin login at all and kept coming up with error messages. Research via google finally told me to look for ‘white space’ in the wp-config.php file. That means empty lines or spaces that shouldn’t be there. I got rid of every empty line and space I could find, saved it and uploaded and voila! I could log in again. whew! That was the easy fix!
- My family blog – I had files all mixed up on the server from a few years of trying out different things so decided to remove them and then do a reinstall of WordPress to a new folder – I was just basically tidying up the files on the server as it was getting full. However the new installation just wouldn’t take and I ended up with a blank screen – you couldn’t view the blog at all. I removed that folder and created a new one and started again. Same scenario. I was stumped. Further if I added /wp-admin/ to see if I could log in I would just get gobbledegook on the screen – no dashboard at all. Investigations on wordpress.org and google seemed to indicate my server might be full (it wasn’t) and/or that WordPress hadn’t installed properly – I would need to do a manual install. ughh!
- I upgraded another blog that I run for my husband and his mtb racing team to wordpress 3.0 and experienced the exact same problem as no. 2.
- I accidentally deleted a couple of files from my business blog when thinking I was logged into my family blog (see no. 2) and didn’t stop it in time. Checked blog and it seemed ok and I wrote a new post to it this morning but when I went to view the blogpost once published the site produced an error message and I could no longer access the blog or view the posts. I had to call in help from a friend who specialises in this type of work to fix the problem. Reinstalling the wp-admin and wp-includes folders in this instance did not solve the problem.
If you manage one or several blogs then it’s important to have some backup systems in place. I don’t just mean having a backup for your blogposts (you should have that without saying and if you haven’t then login to your blog immediately, go to the plugins section search for the wp-backup plugin and install it – then activate it) but I mean a back up of your actual wordpress files too.
Fantastico which is in my control panel online does not seem to have the option to reinstall or repair WordPress – only to do a new install or remove an existing one. That’s been fine for most of the time but I’ve had 4 blogs this week (one client, one voluntary and 2 of my own) that have had problems and all of them when I’ve done an upgrade to 3.0 or attempted to change something in 3.0. Not sure if that means there’s a problem with that version or I’ve just been unlucky this week. But I did not have copies of the original files – only the edited ones I’d been playing with at some stage.
That means having to do a manual reinstall of the program and the version I’m using is no longer available for downloading from wordpress.org. So then I had to consider downloading the 3.0.1 version and printing off the instructions for the manual installation. However, I already had databases set up as they are existing blogs so I wasn’t sure how much of the installation process I could ignore or should take notice of?
If I’d had a clean copy of WordPress 3.0 I could have reuploaded the wp-admin and wp-includes folders in the hope that would fix the problem. I do know enough to keep a copy of the wp-config.php file and not overwrite that one – that’s the file that holds the database, login and username information.
So, what did I do? I looked through my various blogs (I own several) and found one I believed to have clean copies of the wp-admin and wp-includes folders and copied them over to the folder of one of the blogs I was having challenges with. I then proceeded to upload those folders by FTP to the web and waited for the results. Would it succeed or wouldn’t it?
What lesson have I learnt? To make sure that every single WordPress site I manage or own, that I do a full download of each of the folders and files that are installed online and keep them safe (and backedup) in case I need to reupload them at any time. Having the posts backup file (xml) isn’t enough. And if you have the tgz backup file, then you need to know how to restore that file. In the meantime I’ll go back to what I was doing – manual installs of the latest wordpress files in the hope that they’ll become visible again.
Tags: About Blogging by Kathie Thomas
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It was my eldest daughter’s fault this time. She started the idea when she took me to this fantastic place 2 weeks ago that was a cafe/restaurant/nursery and formal gardens. Just gorgeous and the food and coffee is really great… and home made! She was telling me about her favourite coffee places and I said to her without thinking, ‘you know that would be a good idea for a site’. I kept squashing the idea everytime it popped up after that but yesterday morning (Saturday) because I didn’t have to rush out of bed I let my mind play over the past week or two and then it popped back in my head again! Before I knew it I was on my computer and looking for a suitable domain name and found a fantastic template and voila! The site was born.
