Dashboard Contents disappeared

Any hints would be very helpful!

Same thing is happening for me. Pretty weird. I just upgraded a site 2.6. Everything was working an then this. I was messing around with plugins at the time, (Adminimize possibly?), but when I uninstalled them all, it didn’t change anything…

I have the same problem after upgrading to 2.6. I also deactivated all plugins but no dice. Cleared cache and cookies. Nope. I then deleted and reinstalled WP-admin from scratch. Nada.

I never noticed the exact URL path for the “Dashboard” links before but they appear to be broken. mine is just like sys2074 describes, i.e. “…/wp-admin/admin.php?page=index.php” and this yields the correct header and footer, but no “Right Now” or widget content. A direct link to “…/wp-admin/” or “…/wp-admin/index.php” brings up the full dashboard.

Fix:

Remove the file index.php from your wp-content/plugins folder. Once done the correct link URL appears on the dashboard and the content appears when they are used. I am not sure why there is an index.php file in the plugins folder in 2.6… it is empty except for a comment and was not there when I checked my 2.5 backup files.

Link

Nice!

Thanks that was it. The thing is that no WordPress install that I know of puts an index.php file into your plugins directory. I put that file into my folder myself. on purpose. It annoys me that suddenly it is breaking things. It was there for security so that people could not peruse my plugins directory and see what I am using.

For some reason… and I have no idea why, because as near as I can tell, this is useless… but, for some reason, if you have an index.php file in your plugins directory, it completely changes the dashboard url.

The dashboard URL is normally: “/wp-admin/index.php”

It gets changed to: “/wp-admin/admin.php?page=index.php” which in turn loads that index.php file from the plugins directory into the space where the dashboard used to be. Could be interesting because you could add your own dashboard using that, but then it doesn’t use it when you first login, so kind of useless…

If you are concerned with this small security measure, you can replace with a blank ‘index.html’ file. That is what I did.

What a headache. Thanks again art4mad.

You are welcome, but in my case it HAD to have been placed there by something in the WP 2.6 update. Just before I updated I copied my entire blog, every directory and file, to my computer. After upgrading I starting having the problem. Looking back at my pre-upgrade files there was no index.php in my /plugins directory. Unless one of the plugins I had previously added the index.php when they were reactivated somehow i do not know where that file came from. I know I did not add it myself, although I DID at an index.php file into the wp-content folder because there was now one in that folder in 2.6.

Go figure. Thanks for the security tip.

I know this is closed, but the index.php resolve noted above did nothing to help me. I simply deleted the entire wp-admin directory and re-uploaded a fresh version of it.

I’ve been using auto-upgrade function for new versions for a while before that, and I suspect that some clutter was not being properly removed; cleansing the folder did the job.