Bear, Diah and Pasha

404 After Upgrade

Posted on the July 26th, 2008 under Blog by Papa Bear

Every time I logged in to my dashboard, there would be a link to upgrade my WordPress from 2.5.1 to 2.6. Eventually, last Monday I could not resist it anymore and bravely (may be stupidly would be more appropriate…) click to upgrade via the Fantastico. Well, I said bravely because that would be the first time for me doing such a thing and stupidly because I did not do my research first.

Anyway, the upgrade took only a few seconds and once I refreshed my blog, everything seemed to be in order. That remained true until I clicked on one of the posts link and ka-boom! I got the shock of my life. Not just any kind of shock but it was one of those monkey kind of shock. Terkejut beruk, if I were to say it in my mother tongue.

I asked my hosting support and they suspected it was a database problem and after about 3 days of trying this and that and with myself getting from shocked to annoyed, the hosting support finally found that the problem have been reported by many others who upgraded to 2.6. Thanks to KG Lim of eSurge Network who pointed me to that and for trying hard to resolve the issue.

The problem had nothing to do with the database but it was due to the permalinks. For those who have been using the default format, then they would not get the problem. Any other format would give you the 404 page not found error.

If I have done more research before the upgrade, I would have found out that there is a temporary fixed (before 2.6.1) that have been posted at the WordPress.org Support Forum. There are three ways to get rid of the 404 problem:

1. If you’re using Linux/Apache on your webserver, you don’t really need the index.php anyway. Try removing it. The index.php thing was only meant for IIS servers, which don’t support mod_rewrite.
2. If you need/want the index.php to be there, then on the Settings->Permalinks screen, add some values in for the category and tag bases. The words “category” and “tag” will do just fine. As long as they are not blank, this should work around the bug.
3. (For advanced users only) If you want to patch the problem yourself, there is a fix available in trac ticket 7306.

I tried the first one and my whole blog could not even load and the third one is too complicated for me. Therefore, I went for the easiest solution, which is the second one, and things were back to normal.

Despite the three day loss, it was a great experience for me!