index.html can cause data loss

  • I had an index.html living next to index.php at the root of my wordpress installation. When going to my domain it was loading the index.html which is what I wanted.

    I then went to work making some tweaks to my WordPress settings. Everything was fine until I was messing with the Widgets. As I made changes to some of the widgets it was clear that it was trying to access mydomain.com/index.php but that was being redirected to mydomain.com/ which was causing the index.html file to load. This raised hell with the widgets page and the Total Widget Control plugin.

    I wasn’t able to save any changes to the widgets and had to remove the index.html file in order to make WordPress work correctly. All of the widgets that I had previously loaded were lost.

    It appears this changeset #9203 is what changes the url.

    Its possible that this could be a bug with Total Widget Control but this issue caused me to lose several hours of work.

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  • Actually that changeset simply removes a trailing slash in the url that has a tendency to cause problems for sites that make use of mod_rewrite.

    WordPress looks for index.php because… well, that’s the main file used for handling data. If you disable it or prevent the site from accessing it, you effectively break WordPress (that’s actually true for almost all CMS’s… it’s not WordPress specific).

    It’s not a bug… you’re blocking WordPress from accessing a file required for it’s core functionality.

    If you simply want your users to see a static maintenance or “coming soon” splash page while you’re building your site, you should either be hooking into built-in maintenance mode in WordPress, or using a plugin like Maintenance Mode.

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