Front Page redirects to site home page.

try deleting the .htaccess in wordpress root
regenerate permalinks
admin – settings – permalinks

I didn’t find .htaccess in the wordpress root directory. I did go to admin->settings->permalinks and changed from default to the next choice (Day and name) and saved the settings. Still, the file .htaccess is not present. It seems like WordPress is not saving it!

Thank you for your efforts. If you have further ideas, I would appreciate knowing.

https://www.maxwell.cc/wordpress/

you need the .htaccess file – so create a blank one according to this
https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Using_Permalinks#Creating_and_editing_.28.htaccess.29

upload and chmod 666
now generate your permalinks again
chmod .htaccess to 644 for security

I can’t change the read/write settings for just one file in Concentric web hosting from what I can tell. They use a VDE system (not unix) or something like that.

Through the Concentric File Security system on their web site I am able to set user permissions for the directory to any user and any domain but then the web browser gives a 500 error when trying to browse to the https://www.maxwell.cc/wordpress/wp-admin folder.

I don’t see how to set permissions for “wordpress” to read and write files because I don’t know what user “wordpress” is. I have tried all users I can think of such as my name, admin, and sql. I have not been able to get WordPress to change the file after changing permalinks in the admin-settings-permalinks.

I wish there was a utility to help me through this process instead of having to use all these awkward tools to manually do it.

Also, each time I change or update the permalinks in WordPress it says it is successful whereas it hasn’t done anything, sometimes an .htaccess file doesn’t even exist and WordPress reports a successful change. I don’t get it.

After using Concentric’s built in Security editor, the .htaccess file looks like this:

AuthName /web/wordpress Access File
AuthType Basic
<Limit GET POST PUT DELETE HEAD>
require anymember
</Limit>

This is located in the /wordpress/ directory.

So, the file is there but I don’t understand why WordPress can’t access it and why the web browser keeps going back to my web site home page instead of the blog front page. I do have the ability to log into the wp-admin folder and then edit things about the site like permalinks and pages and posts and users and so on, but I just can’t see the blog’s front page. It keeps directing it back to the site’s home page!

Please help.

I have gone back to WordPress 2.2 and have restored my data because this was taking me over three days to sort out. I will have to wait until getting help to move or upgrade to 2.8. Sorry.

The problem was that when trying to access my blog, it would redirect me to the site home page. I could access the wp-admin etc… but not the front page at all.

Hmmmm… Similar situation: just upgraded to 2.8, and when I click the link to the blog (jeff-welsh.com/wordpress) I am redirected to the site index page. No error messages, just says loading, then “done” and doesn’t go anywhere. I haven’t changed any coding on the site itself… Do you think it might be a .htaccess problem on my end as well?

I am having the exact same problem(s)-

The PHP is sending my browser location outside my wordpress folder. I have long given up on trying to update and am now simply trying to do a fresh install, as simple as possible! My code/browser’s attempt to locate to https://mySite/testblog/ is dropping off the subdirectory -“testblog” and is going to https://mySite/.

I’ve been rewriting my issue for weeks now! Scroll toward the bottom firstly because you may find a re-cap of all that’s been written above it. My progress on things like scrutinizing .htaccess are journalled in that thread.

Well, HansUmstranja, I salute you for trying more than 30 times to get this all sorted out. It seems like you and I have one thing in common. Concentric. We both have tried this on Concentric and that is where things start to get interesting. I have requested a paid service by their Professional Services team to upgrade me from 2.2.3 to 2.8.2 and we shall see how they do.

Secondly, I believe that WordPress version 2.8.2 and 2.2.3 are writing permalink changes to an .htaccess file that we cannot see, hidden in the same directory probably as our MySql directory and not within our reach. I believe that this is a Windows Server (chmod won’t work, it has a VDE environment though I am not professional enough to know differences).

I notice that samboll (moderator) suggested the same thing to you as he did to me but then things get left alone after that.

The way things are supposed to work and the way they work are two different things and we need a utility to track down where the file is that the permalinks are being stored, when the .htaccess file is written to, where that file is, and whether or not the writing was really successful or if WordPress reports it as being successful but isn’t really.

For example, when I upgraded the database or upgraded WordPress initially, there were about 5 errors but then WordPress said it had successfully done the upgrade. Well, I knew that not to be true and so now I don’t have confidence when WordPress says that changes are successfully updated.

I noticed that the original WordPress .htaccess file had simply the following line in it and nothing else and it was never modified since the first installation in 2007.

ForceNoProxy ON

That’s all.

Well, anyway, I think most people host WordPress on unix based servers evidently and Concentric is a bit different.

By the way, I have FrontPage extensions turned off and that enables CGI scripts. That doesn’t make a difference though.

I am sorry you have had to go through so much.

I am glad to write about this though and hope that others will also make some comments.

The answer that would be most helpful would be to question: Truely, how interrelated or how irrelevent is .htaccess to WordPress? With regards to Permalinks, the .htaccess file is expected. But if we wanted to ignore ‘customizing’ our Permalinks, could the .htaccess file be ignored as totally irrelevant to the installation, at least until we get the blog installed and working?!

With regards to .htaccess and its necessity, WordPress documentation, in the context of updating Permalinks, assumes that the file exists, either by user insertion or by WordPress during installation.

If your installation of WordPress does not generate a .htaccess file or if it does not write the new rules onto your existing .htaccess file then there are a couple reasons that could be causing this.

I know that WordPress can create a file in my (sub)directory where I have my ‘testblog’ because I’ve used the wp-admin/setup-config.php. to create a config.php file. But I’ve never seen WordPress create the .htaccess file. It wasn’t until I added that file that a directory would have .htaccess. I suspect that the Codex is wrong or out of date with regards to WordPress installing an .htaccess file.

The recommendation at this point is to update the file permissions to .htaccess- “upload and chmod 666, now generate your permalinks again, chmod .htaccess to 644 for security”. A few other people have mentioned as well that you only want to give file permissions of 666 for a short period of time.

The implication is that the user would have to know when WordPress wants write access to .htaccess. This is a failure on the part of WordPress because, evidently, prudence dictates for that file should idle with only 644 access, and WordPress doesn’t prompt the Administrator that it is attempting to write to .htaccess, so how would we know to temporarily apply chmod?

By the way, if you aren’t seeing the .htaccess in any directories, you may need to find the menu item-“Show hidden files” which has to be a ubiquitous function in any FTP software; in as much as you’ll find a door knob on both sides of a door; It’s got to be there.

The .htaccess file exists when you go to your Concentric Gateway and use Files/Security/Protect Directory and mandate limits via the interface as to who can access that directory. It creates or updates the .htaccess file. And if you remove all limits to that directory, then Concentric follows through by deleting the .htaccess file from the directory. If you want to keep an .htaccess file, you use the Gateway interface to “padlock” the directory (creates .htaccess file) and then edit the .htaccess file manually via Concentric’s file manager or software-FTP.

Regarding Concentric and CHMOD: After a phone conversation, I’ve gleaned that Concentric limits permissions. There is no work around for CHMOD at Concentric because that functionality has been “locked down”. If WordPress truely is attempting to write to the .htaccess file, it’s not succeeding because the file security isn’t as leniant as 666 because its 660. With the Dashboard settings/Permalinks, ‘saving’ a new choice’ of radio button isn’t giving me any flags or text that would indicate that it is not able to the write to the .htaccess file, despite that the Codex says –

“If it can’t, it will say something like ‘You should update your .htaccess now’ and print out the rules for you to copy and paste into the file (put them at the end).”

Which brings things full circle to the question: Truely, how interrelated or how irrelevent is .htaccess to WordPress?

Well, I downloaded the plugin called WordPress Automatic Upgrade and stepped through it (going from version 2.2 to 2.8.2) and now my blog works (I am not redirected to the web site home page – the blog front page loads correctly).

The next step will be to upgrade the theme to the latest version. I have been using Atahualpa version 2.21 but will try to upgrade to 3.4.2.

Here goes… it worked!!! Now I have WordPress 2.8.2 and Atahualpa 3.4.2 working without redirecting the blog front page to the web site home page (www.maxwell.cc versus https://www.maxwell.cc/wordpress)

But I must say that I did download another plug that has to be mentioned.

Disable Canonical URL Redirection
I will copy the text of this plugin here. It was activated while I still was in WordPress 2.2 and Atahualpa 2.21. Maybe this was the secret, I don’t know. I have to say that at the end of the wp-admin/wp-upgrade I was redirected to the web site home page. But then I pressed forward and activated the plugins through the automatic process continuation link and then things worked normally.

Anyway, here is the text of that plugin that might have helped…

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Disable Canonical URL Redirection
Description: Disables the “Canonical URL Redirect” features of WordPress 2.3 and above.
Version: 1.0
Author: Mark Jaquith
Author URI: https://markjaquith.com/
*/

remove_filter(‘template_redirect’, ‘redirect_canonical’);

?>

I’ve been struggling with this same issue for several days now. I followed danielmaxwell’s last post and it worked beautifully! Thanks so much!

danielmaxwell’s post worked for me as well. It was the “Disable Canonical URL Redirection” plugin that did it. Thanks!

Another user claimed to have solved their login redirection problem via editing the .htaccess file, I’m going to try this out.

I don’t have a .htaccess file in my installation, I wonder if that is the missing piece of the puzzle.

I had this same problem. There was an easy fix for me. Hopefully this will help someone else.

Here was my set up…I have my wordpress running in a subdirectory called ‘blog.’ The htaccess that was in my root folder for my main site was causing the redirect. It was because of the DirectoryIndex line. Basically the DirectoryIndex line does this: when you type example.com/blog, you are telling the browser to open a directory (aka a folder) called ‘blog’ on your server. Since no specific file or page was specified in the URL, the browser looks for an index page (index.php .html, whatever) to display, or it looks at the htaccess file to tell it where to go. So because my htaccess file in my root folder said ‘DirectoryIndex /blah/blah’ instead of ‘DirectoryIndex index.php’, the browser redirected to https://www.example.com/blah/blah.

The solution is to make an htaccess file specifically for the subdirectory (folder) ‘blog.’ All you need to do is open a basic text editor and type DirectoryIndex index.php . Save it as .htaccess and upload it to the subdirectory ‘blog.’

This will stop the undesired redirecting. Hopeflly I explained everything clearly so if anyone else with this problem stumbles upon this thread thru google like I did, they can fix this.