July 10th, 2009

This post could also be titled “How to reinstall your WordPress site from scratch including a complete reinstall of the database and recovery of all content” but that’s way too long AND it doesn’t even fully explain the ordeal I just went through after making a GRAVE ERROR in the process of creating a favicon. Let’s start at the beginning…

What Happened?

About 4 hours ago (it means nothing in relative terms but it was around 12pm EST) I set out to create a favicon for my site. It’s been a while since I did this so I google-d “fav icon for my wordpress site” and was led to this article on WordPress Hacker. I followed along and quickly created a 16×16 image which I converted to .iso format using the brilliant favicon.cc and saved to my desktop.

After uploading the file to my wp-content/themes/middlenamejames directory and adding the line into header.php I should have been done. I could see the icon sitting on the left of the URL but that wasn’t enough. I wanted to see the same icon in the address bar of my wp-admin screens. Little did I know that all I had to do was place the icon into the root of my site. Instead what I attempted to do was place it into the wp-admin directory and then proceed to add the same into admin-header.php. Big mistake! Read on…

I hit refresh and waited for the admin page to reload with the new favicon just like the published site had. The page went blank. The page stayed blank. I quickly opened admin-header.php and removed the line of code before promptly uploading it to the server EXACTLY THE SAME as it was before the screen went blank. Waited a little while and then refreshed – nothing happened. Checked the public site and that was fine. Refreshed the admin page again, but still nothing. I was concerned.

Reaching Out and Finding a Solution

The next few hours were spent uploading and downloading files, tweeting friends for help or advice and searching frantically for possible explanations and “quick-fix” solutions for this apparently phantom error which was causing the wp-admin not to function. After going around in circles a hundred times I opted for a complete reinstall of WordPress both locally and remotely. This involved backing up the existing database, deleting the entire installation from the root of the server then reinstalling WordPress and setting it up. That part was easy, as was putting the current theme back. What was more of a challenge was importing the data from the mysql backup. It had something to do with using WordPress 2.8 on MediaTemple grid server as oposed to using WordPress 2.7 using the same database name also on the same MT grid server. It seems at the root of the issue was the fact that this new install of WordPress 2.8 had created database tables which had a slightly different prefix to the ones in the old table and as a result I had to import the old tables (which were named differently that the tables in the new database) and then copy the content from each separately into the corresponding table…

This could undoubtedly go on but there’s too much to try and explain that will be of enough interest to anyone. The immediate message is this though – don’t mess around with WordPress wp-admin files unless you know what you’re doing. Oh, and if you want a cool icon to accompany your URL, check out that WordPress Hacker article on how to create a favicon.

Coming up next…

Backing up your WordPress Site and Database, Recovering content from a previous install of WordPress, and much more!

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