Dmitry Andrews

It happened to my blog too. Turned out the theme that I had purchased online used a WordPress API named the_excerpt_rss() to build the description of the page in a meta tag.

The plugin modifies the output of that API which works fine in RSS feeds but messes up the meta tag and the page.

I solved the issue as follows:
– Find the_exceprt_rss(); in your theme’s php files. Most likely it’s in the header.php
– Replace it with this:
echo get_the_excerpt();

That will do the same except that it won’t be affected by the plugin.

Note that it’s wrong using the_excerpt_rss() anywhere but in the RSS feed. So the blame is on the theme’s author.

ok, I was able to resolve it by contacting my hosting provider’s support team. I still wonder why it worked when accessed by the URL mentioned above and didn’t otherwise.

Another interesting detail is that I can only use social login when I paste the URL into the browser’s address bar.

(Talking about https://domain.com/wp-login.php?oa_social_login_source=login)

If I create a menu item on my wordpress blog that takes me to that URL, and make a social login attempt, social login still fails.

I think I was able to narrow down the issue. It goes like this:

Login through a social networking service (facebook, google, etc) always fails UNLESS the login URL contains this “wp-login.php?oa_social_login_source=login“

As soon as the login page is accessed via a GET request containing the oa_social_login_source parameter set to “login”, social login succeeds and evrything works as expected ever since.

I may assume that there is a problem with my hosting provider’s nginx configuration. However, I need to understand what difference that oa_social_login_source parameter makes. It will give me a clue to what they should fix.

Please explain what the oa_social_login_source parameter does and if you have any ideas why nginx mail fail to serve the social login request without that parameter specified in the URL.

One final update. The exact error message is this:

405 Not Allowed
nginx/1.6.2

It turns out my hosting provider uses nginx as a load balancer or something. The errors that I found in the log are not related to the issue. The error occurs before the request reaches the Apache backend server actually hosting my wordpress blog.

Sorry if post too many updates, but I just found a way to work around the issue. Having said that, I don’t think my readers will use it since they will be scared of the error page.

Here’s how you can log in regardless of the access denied error:

– Log in using any social networking service (facebook, google, etc)
– You will see the access denied error page
– Select the URL displayed in the browser’s address bar. It’s https://domain.com/wp-login.php?oa_social_login_source=login
– Hit enter to load that page again
– You will be able to log in successfully

Does that ring a bell? What can be tweaked to fix the issue?

A follow up. It only worked in Chrome on my machine because of existing cookies. I cleared cookies and now it doesn’t work in my Chrome either.