jbaugh

Handoko,
Thank you very much for your prompt and very helpful response.

I have seen the .htaccess file and the wp-config.php.
But I’m not certain which database “database” refers to and where I would locate it.
John

Oops!
I forgot to provide the url to my site:

Liberty Christian Church

John

I don’t know why exactly, but the error 400 problem is resolved! Thanks Krishna and Acey for your suggestions and help.

I simply reviewed the large list of markup errors that was generated when Krishna ran the validation service on my site. I picked out some that seemed easy enough for me to fix and I fixed a handful of them. I had no idea what to do with the “ID features already defined” errors so I left them alone.

Much to my surprise, when I tried to directly edit header.php in wp-admin it worked fine with no 400 error message.

John

I’m using the “Liberty” theme. It is very unlikely that the author would respond to my request for help. You may well be correct in your suspicion that the problem is caused by the theme. But it seems strange that it has worked for the past 2 years and then now suddenly doesn’t. The only recent change I’ve made to the coding is the addition of some commenting entries in the header.php.

Thank you for including the link to the markup errors. Do you think it would help if I were to go through those errors and try to correct them?

Thanks again.
John

The URL is:

lccut.org

I don’t know if this is helpful or not but I’ve noticed that I get the 400 error when trying to edit other .php files as well as the header.php file.
All of the files listed under “Template” in the editor will update except for these:

archives.php
comments.php
functions.php
header.php

John

Thanks Krishna.
I have tried to follow your instructions. I first deactivated each plugin one at a time. This had no effect on my problem. I selected the Twenty Eleven theme, again with no effect, still getting the invalid request error.
I’m not sure what “resetting permalinks” involves. But I did go to the permalinks section under settings and selected a different option under Common Settings and saved the changes. This had no effect.

I am really a novice working with WP. I did discover, however, that I can make my desired changes in the header.php file by downloading it with my FTP client and directly editing it and then re-uploading it. But this seems an awkward way to accomplish my purposes.

I have been able to edit the header.php file without difficulty for nearly 2 years. Why would this problem suddenly occur? I haven’t added any new plugins recently nor have I made any structural changes to my site.
Thanks for you interest and help.
John

Thanks michael.
Using your help and a suggestion from another responder I was able to fix this problem.

In phpMyAdmin it showed my username as “admin”. I was unable to reset my password with this username in the usual fashion. It kept asking for an email in order to allow reset of the password and it refused all email addresses I’ve ever used. So I went back into phpMyAdmin and put the original long numerical password back into the password field AND added an email in the blank email field. When I tried to log in to WP-admin it refused to accept my credentials as before. But this time I was able to request a reset of my password using “admin” as my username and the email address I had added in phpMyAdmin. Now all works fine again. I have no idea how this problem spontaneously occurred after weeks of being able to log in with no problem.
John

esmi,
Thank you for your response.
I’ve spent many hours working on this problem. Your links helped me to a final solution.

None of the links you provided directly solved the problem. But I found the solution by adding an email to the blank email box in the bowels of phpMyAdmin.
I then placed back the long numerical string that had been in the password field originally.
This time when I tried to log in to WP-admin it still would not accept my credentials. BUT it now allowed me to request a reset of my password using the new email address I had added in phpMyAdmin. Now all is well once again. I had a momentary scare when I found that while I could access WP-admin I got only a blank page when I tried to open my site in any browser. I then realized that in an earlier step I had deactivated my site theme. When I re-activated it everything was fine.
Thanks for putting me on to the right trail.
John

Here’s the part of the code that I believe controls the behavior of the navigation buttons:

<div id="page">
			<div id="left">
				<div id="button">
					<ul>
						<li class="first"><a href="https://lccut.org/">Home</a></li>

						<li><a href="https://lccut.org/about-us-2/">About Us</a></li>

						<li><a href="#" onClick="return clickreturnvalue()" onMouseover="dropdownmenu(this, event, 'nav1')">Resources</a></li>
<div id="nav1" class="dropdown"><a href="https://lccut.org/sermons/">Audio</a><a href="https://lccut.org/video-resources/">Video</a><a href="https://lccut.org/encouragement-from-the-word/">Text</a></div>
						<li><a href="https://lccut.org/current-studies/">Current Studies</a></li>
						<li><a href="https://lccut.org/location/">Location</a></li>
						<li><a href="https://lccut.org/contact-us/">Contact Us</a></li>
						<li><a href="https://lccut.org/links/">Links</a></li>
					</ul>
				</div>

John

Sorry,
I didn’t give the link to the site:

lccut.org

John