Starting from yesterday, I had a terrible time trying to figure out what was wrong with WordPress. I couldn’t login as my usual user, which uses a special character in the username. Actually, I got blocked by WordFence because it couldn’t read the special character and thought I was logging in using random names.
I managed to use a previous session on a different site to see what was wrong, and I thought that maybe a plugin was an issue. I tried to update CloudFlare, and it said it updated, but nothing happened.a
Then I tried to disable unnecessary plugins, but each time I selected a single plugin, it wanted to delete them all!
So I decided maybe it was a database issue. I couldn’t access the database through WP like I usually do, though.
And so why not upgrade to MariaDB from MySQL? And upgrade NginX as well? And do a bunch of other stuff, like update WP-CLI?
So that happened, and I still couldn’t log in. I tried using WP-CLI to uninstall plugins, but some didn’t seem to want to go. Well, I was about to give up, and then it logged in. What happened? I have no idea…
My main guesses, though, would be:
- Akismet: it threw a WP-CLI upgrade error
- CloudFlare: it was upgraded that day before the error popped up
- A WP plugin load order error
- A WP update error: reinstalled WP
- JetPack: it couldn’t communicate with WordPress servers before disabling and re-enabling it
- MySQL, changed to MariaDB
- PHP5, reinstalled
- Local cookies, but they weren’t deleted
Again, I didn’t really do anything besides reinstall, upgrade, change out some software, and other stuff that shouldn’t have had a huge impact, but something made it work.
Photo by sillygwailo 