URL changes but HTML content is not updated

  • This is looking to be more a server or server configuration issue rather than a WordPress-specific issue, but I’m hoping the braintrust here might be able to help me suss out what the problem is.

    I have a WordPress site that doesn’t have anything terribly atypical for the sites that I develop frequently. It’s simpler, actually.

    • The only plugin used is NextGEN Gallery
    • A single custom post type in addition to a handful of pages
    • Permalinks simply map to /%postname%/

    On my development server and staging server, everything works great. But when I deployed the site to my client’s server (Mac OS X Server v10.6.8/Snow Leopard running PHP 5.3.6 and mysqlnd 5.0.8-dev) something strange is happening that has me stumped.

    The first page (sometimes two) requested from the site come back fine. As you click through the navigation (URLs are hard coded, not using WP menus) the URL displayed in the browser changes and the server returns a 200 status code, but the HTML doesn’t update. If you click back though any of the pages that displayed the incorrect HTML, it remains (as cached).

    If you do a hard refresh on any of the pages with the unchanged/incorrect HTML, it will update to the correct content. But only if refreshed after that first bungled request.

    Especially big puzzlers:

    1. Not specific to any browser or platform. Its everywhere.
    2. Javascript is ruled out – even with all js removed entirely the issue remains.
    3. Debug mode doesn’t return any errors.
    4. I have’t examined PHP or apache error logs yet. (No direct access to that from my end. Waiting for these from the client.)

    I’m wondering if this smacks of anything specific to anyone. If not, any thoughts regarding what to look at next are greatly appreciated.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • Install the HttpFox add-on for FireFox and watch the exchange between the browser and the client. Of course, something like WireShark will do the same and more but HttpFox is very convenient.

    Your URLs change from what to what?

    Thread Starter dropkickpdx

    (@dropkickpdx)

    Right. I’ve been looking at the request and response headers all day.

    The request goes out for the correct URL, then the response returns OK (200) without pushing any new HTML.

    The URLs change from the current page to the next page being requested. Which is the correct behavior. We’re just not getting the content to go with it. ??

    Thread Starter dropkickpdx

    (@dropkickpdx)

    Technically, I’ve solved the problem. However, I’d still like to know if anyone can shed some light on what might actually be the specific cause of the behavior I’ve been tangling with here.

    The issue doesn’t present itself when PHP files are ignored by mod_expires. Which makes me suspect it’s a suboptimal configuration rather than something actually broken.

    Here’s the chunk I added to the htaccess file to nip it in the bud:

    <filesMatch "\.(php)$">
ExpiresActive Off
Header set Cache-Control "private, no-cache, no-store, proxy-revalidate, no-transform"
Header set Pragma "no-cache"
</filesMatch>
Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • The topic ‘URL changes but HTML content is not updated’ is closed to new replies.

Tags