Help! My WP Site Login Suddenly No Longer Works – plugin compatibility Issue?

[Rick Smith]

(Also posted this in the OptimizePress FB group.)

I suddenly can’t login to my site. I don’t think it’s an OptimizePress issue but I wanted to see if someone had some idea anyway. Everything was fine until last night. I’m in the process of adding forums to the site to use for member accountability. I added bbPress but found it had some issues, namely the first post of a topic doesn’t appear.

So I discovered Simple:Press. I installed it last night and began configuring it this morning. Everything seemed fine but suddenly this morning, I started getting this error when I attempt to login:

“Sorry, you don’t have access to this page.”

A Bing search revealed a number of possible solutions, all of which I tried and none of which worked. So I downloaded my 10/01 backup from my S3 account.

I restored the database and refreshed all WP files. The error appeared to be gone. Next, I went into phpMyAdmin and dropped the additional tables for Simple:Press and Pretty Link. (Forgot 2 mention that I installed Pretty Link Lite as part of the bbPress failed evolution.)

The error is back. It’s got to be a bogus error but it’s preventing me from getting to my WP dashboard the normal way. I can get around it by accessing plugins.php through the browser but that’s not a good long term solution.

I’m not sure what my next move should be. I was thinking of doing one of the following:

1. Blowing away all WP files from the root folder (which I didn’t do this morning – I just overwrote the files), then restoring the DB and WP files from a backup before 10/01 to hopefully eliminate bbPress. I don’t know that bbPress is causing the issue. I just want to get back to a version that’s not getting this stupid error.

2. Exporting all my OP pages by whatever method (I’m not sure how to do that off the top of my head but I’m sure I can find find it), saving a list of my plugins, then blowing away WP completely and starting completely over.

Bottom line: I do NOT want to lose my OP pages. I’ve invested WAAAY too much time in them to get them to where they are. Losing them at this point would be extremely painful.

Any thoughts one way or the other? I can feel my level of frustration rising. I’ve come too far with all of this to lose all this work.

[Rick Smith]

For some reason, the Notify check box didn’t save on the original post.

[Trevor Dumbleton]

Depending on how helpful your host is, they may be able to point you in the right direction.

Gut reaction is that it’s a clash between plugins – the usual solution for that is to remove the likely offenders and then reinstall one by one.

It could also be as simple as a cookie error – try logging in on a different browser or via a private/incognito window.

Not totally recommended but you can usually “remove” a plugin by deleting it via your control panel or FTP access. Be careful if you do that.

Fiverr can also sometimes be a good place for solving this kind of issue – explain what needs to be done and initially contact 2 or 3 possible vendors rather than buy the gig without talking first.

[Rick Smith]

Trevor –

Thanks for the quick response.

>Gut reaction is that it’s a clash between plugins – the usual solution for that is to remove the likely offenders and then reinstall >one by one.

Good suggestion. I’m quite familiar with that troubleshooting method. I’ve used it many times. This was actually one of the first things I tried this morning (out of a long list of many items). Unfortunately, it didn’t make any difference. I got the error even with all plugins deactivated.

>It could also be as simple as a cookie error – try logging in on a different browser or via a private/incognito window.

I actually cleared all cookies and cache on this machine. However, I haven’t tried logging in from another machine. Just tried it. Same error. I’m gonna upload a file, force-upgrade.php, that someone gave me in the OP FB group and try that.

[Rick Smith]

I just ran force-upgrade.php. I’m cautiously optimistic. I didn’t get any errors when I logged in after running the script.

[Trevor Dumbleton]

Fingers crossed!

[Rick Smith]

Trevor –

It seems to be working fine so far. More testing on tap today.

[Rick Smith]

Trevor –

I broke it again when I was installing bbPress. Turned out there was a conflict between the OptimizePress theme and bbPress. Long story short. I installed a different plugin and I now have the forums working. I re-ran force-upgrade.php yesterday and my login is working again. I think I can finally put this one to bed. Yeah!!!

[Bob Thibodeau]

Wow! All of that because bbPress? What are you using now for your forum?

[Rick Smith]

Bob –

Yes and no. bbPress itself didn’t cause the issue. It was a conflict between bbPress and the OptimizePress theme. bbPress seems to work fine with the OptimizePress plugin. I found out that this was a known issue in that several people had reported it. Unfortunately, OptimizePress (the company) has done nothing about the issue even though it was first reported at least two years ago. I don’t think bbPress caused the login errors. I think those occurred because something got jacked up in the WP database after uninstalling bbPress. Luckily, I found out about force-upgrade.php which worked great to clean up that issue.

I wound up using Simple:Press for the forums. That plugin seems to work fine with the OptimizePress theme. You can see the page at http://yourpathtoweightloss.com/forums/. There’s not much to see, though. I’ve got two forums in there but I haven’t turned off the security for the forums themselves so they won’t be visible. I turned off the security for the page itself so people in the OptimizePress Facebook forum could see how the page was rendering. It’s not perfect but I’m going with it for now so I can move on to other things.

[Sean Mize]

one thing I have learned over time is that the fewer plugins you can use to get the usability you need on your site, the smoother things will run in the long run! the more plugins, the more chance of conflict down the road, during a routine upgrade.

Be sure you are taking full daily backups so that you can, in a worst case scenario, revert to the previous days snapshot and you only lose a day’s posting!

Sean

[Rick Smith]

Sean –

I agree. I have very few plugins installed on that site. I have a plugin that runs daily and weekly backups. The daily backups aren’t full (in that I’m not backing up the full site – maybe I should be). The weekly backups are full. In any case, I don’t think a plugin itself caused the login errors. I think those somehow got caused when I removed the bbPress plugin. No idea how. All I know is that after I removed bbPress, that’s when the trouble began.

[Author]

Posts