Tag: wp-login

Yesterday, without a warning or an explanation, my WordPress install started acting funky. Even though I was logged in, I would be faced with very very long URLs showing me a broken login page when I tried to go back to the admin section (something like https://climbtothestars.org/wp-login.php/wp-admin/wp-smilies/wp-content/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=xxxx). Deleting all the cruft after wp-login.php allowed me to log in, but a few clicks later I would find myself faced again with the same nasty situation.

This is caused by a bug in wp-login.php. What happens is that the Blog URL option gets changed to that long funky line in the database, and of course, it messes everything up.

The first thing I did was correct the siteurl value in the database (options table), because I have direct access to the database and like sticking my hands in there. If you don’t have access to the database, you can probably (I’m not certain) set this right through the Options screen in the admin section for your blog. (Remember, if you feel locked out, go directly to http://example.com/wp-login.php to log in.)

There is a forum thread about this problem, but the solution isn’t presented very clearly to my taste — hence this post.

Now for the fix: if you are not going to be moving your blog around (ie, changing the blog address) without having direct access to the database, you can edit the file wp-login.php and delete a couple of lines. Open wp-login.php in your favourite text editor, and do a search for get_settings(‘siteurl’) — that will bring you to the right place in the file. Delete these lines:

// If someone has moved WordPress let's try to detect it
if ( dirname('http://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'])
!= get_settings('siteurl') )
update_option('siteurl', dirname('http://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] .
$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']) );

I’ve had a similar problem with my Blogsome test blog — with the URL for the CSS file going all funky. It seems to be back to normal, but I’ll check that they are indeed aware of the problem.