login page not found

-temporarily rename / delete the .htaccess to see if that resoves the issue.

-if not, try switching to the default theme to rule out any theme-specific issue?

If you don’t have access to your admin area, then access your server via FTP or SFTP or whatever file management application your host provides.

If you have access (myphpadmin) check the URL’s settings.
Also while there, check the Admin accounts since you mention editing them.

Thanks for the help, t-p and webjunk,

tp:

I tried removing/naming .htaccess. No help. I still get a 404 not found error, but this time from Bluehost. When the original .htaccess was there, the 404 error was a page in the site, with the theme intact. When I remove the .htaccess, I just get a vanilla 404 error.

I can’t switch themes, since I can’t login to the admin area. I don’t even get a login screen. I just get 404 not found (even though I can get to the site itself). https://www.erinhydequilts.com/

I do have ftp access, as I mentioned in the original post (that’s how I changed .htaccess), but how do I change the theme there? Is that what you were suggesting?

webjunk:

I checked the siteurl in phpMyAdmin and it hasn’t changed. It correctly targets the subdirectory where I installed WordPress, which is what it was when it was working, as well.

When you say to check the Admin accounts, can you be more specific? The account with the name Admin is gone (I followed Sitepoints security recommendations and removed it after creating new adminstrative accounts with different names.) The three admin accounts are all showing up in the database, but I don’t know what else to look for.

Thanks again. I’m in real trouble here, so I’m really grateful for anyone’s help.
Cyd

index.php is missing from your /wpsystem directory. Start there and see how you progress.

Clayton:

I don’t have an index.php in any of my other sites’ wordpress directories and they’re still working. I even have a copy of this whole site on my test server (no index.php in the wpsystem folder there, either) and I can login there just fine.

Since I run everything from the top directory (www.erinhydequilts.com), that’s where the index.php is that’s doing the work.

I did, of course, try putting one back in with the same settings as the mother directory, but it didn’t help, so I took it back out to match the installation on the test server.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Say, Clayton, how could you see that there’s no index.php in my wpsystem directory?

I can see it because it is missing, and you don’t limit casual browsing of your directories with Options -Indexes in your .htaccess.

//www.erinhydequilts.com/wpsystem/

I suspect what you have done at some point, is setup your site to serve from root, while leaving wordpress in its own directory named “wpsystem”. While doing that you may have deleted the index.php file rather than making a copy of it to place at root.

Giving WordPress its Own Directory While Leaving Your Blog in the Root Directory See step 7 for reference.

But, if you say it’s been working fine… I might be missing something.

Thanks for all the help, everyone.

I ran a check database and it said everything was fine. But since I’d exhausted everything else, including the fine suggestions here, and was getting dizzy from reading through all the code, I went ahead and ran a repair database and voila! – I can once again login. Who knows how it happened, but since it’s fixed, my mood has been greatly elevated. (Of course, it might be the Thai food I just had.)

Hopefully, if anyone else gets stuck in a similar situation, this thread might help them a little.

Thanks again,
Cyd