Help with inherited WordPress website

  • Our company recently lost our website creator and the task has now fallen into my lap to attempt to update the site. I’ve never worked with WordPress before and I am struggling to make this happen.

    I’ve seen in other posts that I need to go to our domain /wp-admin to login to WordPress to do updates. This worked a couple of times, but about the time I figured out how to edit some pages, that quit working. I now get “The website cannot display the page” when I go to that address.

    Website url is jimparsons-law.com. Any idea what could be wrong?

    All help/input would be appreciated.

Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)

  • I went to the site and looks like it still exists.

    Thread Starter bruner01

    (@bruner01)

    jimparsons-law.com still exists and I load that with no problems. The problem lies with going to jimparsons-law.com/wp-admin. That is where the error comes.

    Hopefully you have access via FTP or another file manager? See if one of these methods work:

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

    @brand The front side of the site is up but you get a 500 error when you go to /wp-admin.

    @op Can you contact the original developer? I don’t know they’d move the admin directory.

    What exactly did you change the first couple times you went in there?

    Thread Starter bruner01

    (@bruner01)

    @andrew The original creator is no longer with the company that wrote the site and that company is having major problems with turnovers and it is almost impossible to get responses from them, thus the reason we fired them.

    All I’ve managed to do with the site so far is changing the wording of the text on some pages. Had been poking around trying to figure out how to get write access to some of the other files (ie: footer, headed, etc.).

    @wpyogi I do have FTP access, but I will try that link.

    The header and footer are probably generated by header.php and footer.php respectively. If you’re going to do any real coding, I’d suggest getting yourself an IDE. For a free one, I like Aptana. You can set up a project that automatically ftps into the site for you so you don’t have to ftp everything up/down every time you want to make an edit.

    Thread Starter bruner01

    (@bruner01)

    @andrew I have full access to the cloud server that the website is hosted on, so FTP access is not really an issue. I can do all of the coding right on the server. The permissions don’t seem to respond to changes for some reason though and when I was last able to access the wp-admin it was telling me I needed write access to the header, footer, etc. before I could make changes. This was after I’d given myself full access on each file though. And it was about that time I lost the ability to login on wp-admin. Still looking through the troubleshooting.

    Thread Starter bruner01

    (@bruner01)

    @wpyogi I did the parts of that troubleshooting link that I could. There are is a broken link or two on that page. AFter all that, still unable to access wp-admin.

    What do your server error logs say?

    Thread Starter bruner01

    (@bruner01)

    The very first time that wp-admin is mentioned in the error log is the very first time it refused me access. It says:
    2013-01-21 17:42:16 184.xxx.xxx.xxx 54880 173.xxx.xxx.xxx 80 HTTP/1.0 POST /wp-admin/update-core.php?action=do-core-upgrade&_wpnonce=a8e5807804 - 3 Connection_Dropped jimparsons-law.com

Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)
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