John H

I’ve had a similar issue before when transferring a WordPress site from one host to another. I moved it from Bluehost over to Hostmonster. Here’s what I noticed happened.

The move seemed to go fine and then when I tried editing something (by customer’s request), the site broke and all I could see was text with no template images.

I put things back to how they were, still broken. Ended up deleting everything I moved over onto the Hostmonster account and reuploaded the Bluehost files and database….still broken and looked the same.

Confused I went back to the DNS and pointed the domain name back to Bluehost …. and guess what?

Their site hosted on Bluehost was broken, too!

I hadn’t even touched anything on Bluehost, only Hostmonster.

After about an hour of trying to figure out what was wrong, I figured I might as well just check the Bluehost database for any problems (the only thing I ever did with the Bluehost database was download it).

Turned out the change I made to the database over on Hostmonster made THE EXACT SAME CHANGE on Bluehost!

Something fishy there but I’ll leave the speculation up to you.

What I had to do was set the SITE url in the database (under the options table) to the correct url.

After that, everything worked fine.

So maybe check that.

It’s saying the problem is located in the wp-login.php file, which should be located in your root install of WordPress.

The problem with these kinds of error messages is that often times you’ll fix the problem in that file, but that then will result in a different file’s error message.

Since that file is part of the WordPress core files, you can try Upgrading WordPress to the latest version number. Obviously you can’t log in so you’d have to do it manually.

Here’s WordPress’ official guide on doing it, and here’s a video showing you how to do it.

Hopefully that will solve your problem.

If you want to create a page but not have it contained in the menu, use the Exclude Pages plugin.

Liking to drafts can cause issues.

That’s the thing with spammers, the really good ones find ways to bypass firewalls and anti spam products.

When looking in your admin panel, see if all the comments come from the same IP address. If so, you can ban that person’s IP from ever accessing your site.

Here’s a YouTube video showing you how to do it through .htaccess.

You can also try a plugin called Tan Tan Noodles which does real well at defending against spam comments.

For the most part, you did it the right way.

Typically whenever I transfer customers to our hosting I don’t only copy over their wp-content folder, I copy everything over (all their hosting files).

Then I transfer their database just as you described.

The reason for transferring all their files and folders over is because I want to completely copy and mirror what they had on the other host. The way you did it is fine, though.

As for the last part of your question: Also, what’s the difference between downloading the database from phpMyAdmin and using the “Export” tool from the Dashboard? The “Export” tool seems so much simpler.

There’s a big difference.

The Import/Export is really only for importing and exporting a blog author’s posts, comments, etc. However, a database contains your entire blog’s settings, including usernames, passwords, plugin settings, your WordPress and Blog URLs, if different.

Try renaming your .htaccess files (in the root, wp-admin, and any other directories you have a .htaccess file) to something else, like htaccess-bak

This will disable your .htaccess file. Sometimes wrong code or incompatible code with your web host’s options will cause this error.

If your site pulls up, then go through each line (a block at a time) in your .htaccess file until you pin down what’s causing the issue.

Don’t forget to rename your .htaccess file back to it’s original name, btw.

I have run into issues with my uploader not working after upgrading as well. When you click on the image upload button, see if there’s another option, such as the “Browser Uploader”, you can use.

Reinstalling WordPress probably won’t fix the problem, but I suppose I could be wrong.

You sound like you don’t really know how to upgrade or install WordPress. If you attempt this, please please please create a full backup of your website.

Backup both your WordPress files in your hosting account AND your database.

The Upgrade Tool from within your Dashboard you could say is a partial install because it doesn’t create a new database and all that; it (basically) just installs all the WordPress files except for the wp-content directory and does not erase your wp-config.php file.

It’s doubtful that would help.