Any WordPress nuts-n-bolts geeks here? Having a database problem...
3My company’s website is having fits. We’re using a third-party theme in WordPress, and hosted on an older GoDaddy Linux server.
A couple of pages are broken, but most of the site seems to function correctly. Unfortunately the home page and most popular destination page are two that I’ve identified as not functioning (the first frame on the home page is actually a preview of the second broken page #Clue?).
Everything was working correctly when I went home Thursday. There were a couple of posts scheduled to publish to one of the broken pages on Friday (#AnotherClue?). It’s unknown if those posts were successful because our offices are closed Fridays. I first became aware of the problem with a frantic call from the CEO on Saturday. I’ve been beating on the problem since then.
As I understand it, everything… EVERYTHING WordPress does is stored in the MySQL database. So no matter what I do in the WordPress admin panels, it won’t affect the live site. So of course troubleshooting in the WP dashboard is useless.
I’ve tried deleting the main page frame that calls the second page preview, and committing the change. Main page still broken. So I’m guessing there’s a corrupted record(s) in MySQL.
Does this conclusion seem on spot?
I’ve used the MySQL control panel to rebuild all database tables. Main page still broken.
QUESTION: How can I rebuild the database? Does rebuilding the database even offer a potential solution?
I’m guessing as the site was being designed in WP the various database records were being created in MySQL on the fly. I am unaware of a way to automagically rebuild the entire database. Does one exist?
To complicate issues, GoDaddy has been having issues with their old Linux servers since Friday (#ThirdClue?) causing second-by-secon session disconnections and FTP disconnections so my ability to troubleshoot this has been further complicated.
Any wisdom that can be offered here is desperately appreciated!!!
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Changes you make in the control panel are pushed live when you publish. In the control panel go to your main page (or the broken page) and look at revisions. Can you roll back to Thursday or before Friday? Does that fix it?
@djslack Chris, I suspected you’d have some wisdom on this one…
I’m rolling back the main page to Thursday, when it was known to function. Keeping my fingers crossed.
@djslack Trying to restore Thursday’s revision. Click on Restore… “connecting”, “waiting”, blank page appears where the WP control panel once was.
So either GoDaddy’s server/networking issues persist, or a corruption in the database is causing the rollback to fail?
@djslack Baaahh. No matter which revision I attempt to restore, click restore button… trying to connect… white page.
@ruouttaurmind Ugh,that sucks. I’ve only dabbled with wordpress, so I’m afraid it’s not much wisdom.
I did find an article about database repair that could also be helpful.
Failing that, do you have backups? I think godaddy can be set up to take periodic backups of your site files and databases.
@djslack I’ve got backups of the WP stuff, but the database… no. And GoDaddy apparently doesn’t keep incremental database backups.
Thanks for your time, my friend. I’ve read about a dozen articles on repairing corrupted databases, but all of them tell me to rebuild the tables… first thing I did. I’ll read the article you link. Maybe it’ll have some meaningful info!
I really appreciate your feedback, Chris.
@djslack That article suggests to repair tables. Done it already. Thanks again for your suggestions.
FIXED IT! There was a block in one of my elements that was corrupting the whole friggin site. Delete element, site works!
Many thanks to @djslack for weighing in on this!
@mfladd 14 hours into this issue, and I’m pretty confused myself.
lol
And my job wants to go from SharePoint (admittedly, not the best choice for a public web site) to WordPress but they don’t seem to think that we (“IT”) need much if any training since, you know, “SharePoint is soooo complicated and WordPress is so easy. How hard can it be to switch to WordPress?”
@baqui63 Sure, Wordpress is super easy to set up and get running. But then you need to add plugins and maybe modify a theme. And then there’s a vulnerability in a plugin and your site gets compromised and starts sending out spam. Knowing what’s going on with it is a very good idea. I hope they get you some training.
@baqui63 I really don’t see what SharePoint and Wordpress have in common here… are they trying to move to some sort of collaboration suite that runs under Wordpress or something?
@djslack We’ll get training. While some of the people involved in this are somewhat clueless, there are enough that understand how things need to work, especially since one of our design requirements is five nines of uptime (we don’t always make that, but it is rare that any of our critical systems have fallen even as low as four nines).
@jbartus No this is for our public/marketing web site; nothing to do with collaboration at all. (I fully acknowledge that using SharePoint for such a thing was not the best choice. I was not involved in that decision.)
Just a random GoDaddy headsup…if you only have a single FTP user for a specific folder and you delete that user, GoDaddy deletes the ENTIRE folder that that user is associated with… so, be careful adding and deleting FTP users via cpanel. Learned that lesson the hard way.