phanatic24

Great news! My hosting provider looked into it for me, and was able to work out that WordPress was in conflict with a service called ModSecurity. After he turned it off (which you can do via CPanel) all of the problems went away and it returned to functionality. This is what he said:

“I actually raised an issue with the managed services provider I use, it’s apparently a known issue with modsecurity updates, and seemingly affecting some use cases.

Apparently random redirects is the symptom, which was what I was seeing when submitting the forms.”

A summary of the bugs it fixed:

First, permalinks can’t be changed: /wp/wp-admin/options-permalink.php

Only the default ‘Plain’ can be saved – if you try select and save any of the other options, no matter which folder WordPress is installed in it redirects you to the root (the root index.php has a redirect to the /wp/ subfolder). It used to have custom URLs enabled.

Second, the same thing happens if you create a post and use the HTML tags like or . You can save, preview or post any plain text entries (and the <img> and tags seem to work), but as soon as you Preview, Save or Post something with tags like you get shoved back to the root folder with no error message. These obviously used to work.

Third, Widgets are playing up:

/wp/wp-admin/widgets.php

I used to have a text/HTML nav menu I created as a widget, which was working fine. Now, if you include an tag from the site it automatically loads the full link target page into the widget (and doesn’t save). I had to deactivate the widget I’d written (which has subsequently disappeared) because the URLs were redirecting back to the /wp/index.php (unlike the others, it wasn’t going right back to the root folder.) There was nothing complex about the widget I’d written, it was just:

<div class="custom_menu">
<img src="/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/This-guy.jpg" />
<span class="cust_menu_link">This guy</span>
<p>What's this guy on about?</p></div>

etc.

Now it seems all of my custom URLS are ignored (but the original ugly paths still work.)

From running print_r(apache_get_modules());, these are the modules my server has installed:

Array ( [0] => mod_rewrite [1] => mod_mime [2] => mod_headers [3] => mod_expires [4] => mod_auth_basic )

UPDATE: Ok, the adventure continues. Looking into the closest I could find to someone having the same problem I came across:

Deleting post redirects to root folder but WP site is not at root from 2014.

It suggested it could be a problem with permalinks. Following the advice, I changed the settings back to the default, which worked, but then when I tried to change it back to what I had it as it now redirects to the root foler.

UPDATE:

OK, this is strange but I’ve tried a fresh WordPress install in a subdirectory (new files, new DB), and the problem continues.

The Preview (or Post) button is calling up philbetts.com/wordpress/wp-admin/post.php, but then it sends me back to the root domain, rather than the subfolder (ie. it sends me back to philbetts.com rather than philbetts.com/wordpress where the new site is installed.)

Is this likely a problem with my server? Folder permissions? .htaccess or something?