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Troubleshooting WordPress Problems

Page Contents

Logging Into WordPress Redirects to Old Site
Form Data Doesn’t Appear After Post
Page Preview Doesn’t Work
Change Font or Font Size (Use CSS)
Restoring WordPress MySQL Database
Backup Script Doesn’t Work
The Page Cannot Be Found
Upload File Size Too Small

Logging Into WordPress Redirects to Old Site

When you install WordPress and login to the WP Admin, WordPress may redirect to an incorrect page, usually your old website. This can happen because you have an existing website, you are building a new WordPress site and you haven’t changed the DNS entries to point to the new site yet.

To fix this you need to:

  1. log into your websites control panel
  2. Open phpMyAdmin
  3. Select your MySql database
  4. Browse the wp_options table
  5. Change the siteurl value to the temp URL provided by your hosting company

Now, when you login to WordPress it will open your WordPress admin page.

Form Data Doesn’t Appear After Post

Sometimes posted form data doesn’t appear to the posted page. When this happens you may need to explicitly define the type of data that is posted in the form. Even though this is the default for HTML form posts, you won’t get your data unless it is explicitly stated in your form definition.

This is an example of what you need to add to your forms to make them post data correctly:
<form action="pform.phpmethod="post" enctype="application/x-www-form-urlencoded" name="frm" id="frm">

Page Preview Doesn’t Work

This item is added in the case of creating a new website using WordPress when the original site already exists. Once the WordPress site is up we can simply change the website DNS entries at the place where the customer purchased the domain.

If you can’t View this Page when you are editing it and the page goes to the original website (like http://www.MyDomain.com) then you need to change the General Settings. Click the menu items Settings > General to see the following. The entry in the black box below is what causes the problem:
Fix for problem of failed Page Preview

The Blog Address (URL) item still has the original address in the Blog Address. Just change the Blog address to the same URL as the WordPress address and you’ll be able to preview your pages and Blog entries as you create them.

Change Font or Font Size (Use CSS)

This page shows you how to change fonts and font sizes for a page:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/217268
In short, you need to edit the CSS file. Select the menu options Appearance > Editor then select the CSS sheet you want to edit.

Restoring WordPress MySQL Database

All content you add into WordPress is contained in a MySQL database so in order to ensure the future of your website your WordPress database needs to be backed up.

In case the WordPress database is lost or corrupted you need to restore it from a backup.

To restore the MySQL database do the following:

  1. Extract the .sql file you want to restore and place it onto your hard drive. This backup Help info may assist in this effort.
  2. Open up the website cPanel
  3. Click the Backup Wizard in the Files section then click the Restore icon at the bottom-right
  4. Click the MySQL databases option
  5. Click the Browse button then select the .sql file mentioned in step 1 that you want to restore
  6. Proceed to the end of the wizard to restore the WordPress database

Backup Script Doesn’t Work

Once you have created your backup script and tried to execute it you may not get the results you expect – the /backups/ folder is created but there are no backup files in it.

To fix this problem check to ensure that the script files permissions are set to 744. Also make sure that the file is placed into the root folder of your website account. This may not necessarily be the same folder as your website root folder. Typically the website root folder is a subfolder of the account – normally named something like public_html.

The Page Cannot Be Found

This error can be caused by many anomalies in WordPress like:
1. Your .htaccess file isn’t writable (Linux only)
2. You are on a Windows hosting and you don’t have /index.php/ in your custom permalink
3. Your Windows version of IIS requires some other special configurations

Here are some pages I found to be handy when troubleshooting this problem:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks
http://tech.einaregilsson.com/2007/07/30/pretty-wordpress-permalinks-on-iis/

Upload File Size Too Small

You can increase the maximum file size of uploaded files by modifying either the php.ini file or the .htaccess files of your website. Here are a few references on it:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/245308?replies=12
http://bavatuesdays.com/i-love-wordpress-or-how-to-modify-the-phpini-file-for-uploads-over-2mb-on-bluehost/
http://www.bluehostforum.com/archive/index.php/t-949.html

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