Ike.ninja

WordPress can be a bit finicky at times. I use quite a few different little tricks that I have picked up to help fix some very common problems with wordpress.  Do you have any cools tricks that might make someones life a little easier when working with word press? Let us know.

Viewing WordPress without the DNS pointed at the server:

A lot of times we want to see our site working before we point the world to it. Because wordpress uses the domain name in a lot of it’s functionality this can be difficult. Without this little tid bit wordpress would show up all funky without any style. All you have to do is add the following to your wp-config.php file and configure to meet what you need.

define(‘WP_HOME’,’http://100.100.100.100/~username’);
define(‘WP_SITEURL’,’http://100.100.100.100/~username’);

Adding the ~ with the user name at the end is the way to check out a site without DNS being point for cPanel.  You can just replace the IP and the user name or just the IP depending on your server setup, to see the site in full functionality. You can also make this change by place the same in the database in the wp-options table. The 2 rows that would need to be change would be the ‘home’ and ‘siteurl’.  This can be done via command line or PHPmyadmin.

All my Page links go to 404 pages:

This is a fairly easy fix normally and usually happens when a wordpress site is moved. Moving the site generally breaks the permalink maps. If you login to you wp-admin panel, go to settings ==> permalinks.

Note what you currently are set to. If this is a custom structure you are going to want to copy the structure to a note pad for later use. Once you know what you are currently using, set the perma links to default and then click save.  Now to rebuild the maps you can put the setting you had in there before and click save. Now clear your cache and check your site. Things should be working properly now.

Issues after moving my wordpress site:

Things can get jumbled when moving your wordpress site as we learned above. This little trick has helped me out in a number of areas. Mostly when moving or upgrading a site. By adding the snip-it below to your wp-config.php it tells wordpress that things are moving.

define('RELOCATE', true);

This has helped with the perma link issue above and other anomalies when moving sites. This even helped after a wordpress upgrade when the password was not being recognized by wordpress.

I lost my wordpress admin password:

If you have lost your password and you have access to the database we can change this.  If you login via PHPmyadmin to the database, you can browse to the user table. Choose the use that you need to change the password for and click the edit tab. You will see the section where the encrypted password is stored.

Go ahead and clear out the password and type in what you want the new password to be. There is a drop down menu to the left of the text box that you are typing in. You will need to set that to MD5, then click Save. Now when you are looking at the user in the table view you can see that phpmyadmin encrypted the password for you.

These are some good tricks I use on a day to day basis. I hope they will help you to get your site back up and running. I will post more as I find useful wordpress tricks.