cpanel Fantastico WordPress is hopeless

Do Fantastico installations of WordPress have known bugs that are impossible to fix?

Most of the time, yes. I generally recommend that you avoid Fantastico at all costs.

I once again cannot perform many of the Admin > Manage functions without getting:
“Sorry, you need to enable sending referrers for this feature to work.”

See: https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Enable_Sending_Referrers

When I go to the wp-admin page, I am being taken directly to the Dashboard page without being prompted for my username and password.

WordPress saves a cookie file in your browser so that logging in is no longer necessary after the first login, unless you log out or clear your browser’s cookies.

Should I consider doing a manual install of WordPress without Fantastico?

Yes, I recommend it. The manual installation is not too difficult, and I believe that you will be happier with the outcome.

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Installing_WordPress

How do I completely uninstall Fantastico and the WordPress that it installed? It’s a real mess when I took a look at it in WS_FTP. There are 3 different installations of WordPress, and ‘wp-‘ files in my root directory public_html where they don’t belong. I asked my webhost to uninstall the fantastico and WP. After that I will take your advice and do a manual install.

I did a manual install on another domain (different webhost) a month ago and it has worked flawlessly ever since.

BTW I always have to warn my webhost not to alter or disable my .htaccess file, when troubleshooting problems because I have essential stuff in there my site cannot function without.
Thanks,
Fred

You cannot remove fantastico – it’s a server/host program.

As for WP – do you have a working blog / database ?
If yes, backup it all then nuke it, then restore just waht you need.
If no, just nuke the lot. But do be very sure you do not need everything and take care to nuke only the wp stuff.

“cpanel Fantastico WordPress is hopeless”

No it’s not. I have dozens of working-perfectly Fantastico installs around. I also have a bunch of working-perfectly manual installs. The only differences between them are one little text file (with the version info) in the Fantastico installs, and the absolutely horrendous amount of time it takes me to upload the files for a manual install (which of course I don’t have to do on the hosts which provide Fantastico.)

Is the text file wp-config.php? My webhost told me my Fantastico was corrupted. I can always try fantastico again. If it doesn’t work this time, I’ll try a manual install.

My webhost told me they uninstalled all the WP stuff but I just checked with FTP and it’s still there. How do I uninstall WP from cpanel? I could manually delete all the files in FTP but that’s too slow.

No – its name is fantversion.txt. All it does is tell Fantastico what version was installed when. Otherwise, in a Fantastico install, you get a message that you have to “upgrade manually” when it can’t find that file. It’s a nothing file…. I’ve also upgraded Fantastico installs manually, and simply changed the version number in the file – Fantastico’s perfectly happy with that.

To get rid the install with cPanel, click on File Manager, navigate in File Manager to the wp folder by clicking on the folder icons for public_html, etc. Then when you reach the folder where the wp install lives, click on the name of the wp folder, to the right top of the page you’ll see a list of things you can “do” to the folder, one of which is “delete this folder and all files under it”. Click that, and the folder will move to Trash. Click on the name of the folder near the trashcan in the lower right of the page, and that will delete it permanently.

It seems to me that your host has problems, not your Fantastico installs. I honestly believe your host is full of it. Fantastico doesn’t corrupt installs, unless the host has done something funky with the Fantastico program (which is entirely possible to do – I’m a reseller myself, there’s a LOT of things you CAN do, but most of them are not anything you’d WANT to do). I would be asking some hard questions of this host before I’d be happy staying with them.

I don’t have to do a software uninstall as I would in Windows? I guess Linux/Apache has no registry. I could manually delete the files in FTP too, except WS_FTP won’t let me delete file folders containing files, so that can be tedious if I have lots of files scattered about in different folders.

My webhost is https://www.neutralweb.com
I got them because I needed multiple domain hosting.

Nope, you just delete the sucker. No registry dreck to deal with….

“multiple domain hosting” – what mean you by that? I have multiple domains everywhere I host – including my own reseller account, and 5 domains on one host, a dozen or more on another, and a bunch of clients’ domains around various places. What’s esoteric about that? What am I missing?

Dump ws_ftp, get Filezilla
https://filezilla.sourceforge.net/

And Fantastico ? I will not install anything with it. It screwed up the first two things I wanted installed – there will not be a third time ??

YMMV etc etc

Yep, varies massively…. I won’t allow Filezilla on the place, WS_FTP Pro has worked perfectly for me for over 5 years….

I like WS_FTP, except for the inconvenience of not being able to delete unwanted file folders that contain files.

Having all my domains hosted individually would be prohibitively expensive.

Which version are you using? I can do this with version 8.03. In this version, open Program Options from the Options menu, and on the General screen is a checkbox for Allow deletion of non-empty folders….

I have LE 5.0. That option does not appear to be available in my version.

Hmm. I don’t think you can get an upgrade for that for free…. I just paid for it so long ago now all mine are free. So yeah, you’ll have to do it from file manager. Otherwise you’ll be the rest of your life at it….

I manually installed WordPress, but when I went to wp-admin/install.php, I got this:

Already Installed
You appear to have already installed WordPress. To reinstall please clear your old database tables first.