gpvillamil

I was able to fix everything after all.

My website had actually been hacked – there was a bunch of hidden metadata in the index page, pointing to a variety of dodgy pharmaceuticals and Viagra sites.

Clearly, whoever hacked the site also tampered with the database structure, and this was probably the cause of the problem.

So I backed up my SQL database, deleted it from the server, and installed WordPress from scratch. I then restored each individual table from the backup – data only, no preferences or anything like that. I used a text editor to go through the database and identify each individual table, splitting them out into separate files.

Once done, everything worked again, even post numbers and permalinks.

It was a while ago, and I didn’t keep track of what I did in too much detail, otherwise I’d post step-by-step instructions.

Hmmm. That does not seem to be working.

When I choose “pretty” Permalinks in wp-admin, it says it’s made the changes successfully. However, going to my site and clicking on post titles returns an error: “No input file specified. “

I notice that the .htaccess file is unchanged. Write permissions to the file are enabled, and I do not get an error message in WP when saving changes to the permalink structure.

In any case, I’ve since manually created a .htaccess file that prevents access to wp-config, that seems to work fine.

So is that something I should see if I enable permalinks in WordPress?

Will it be generated automatically, or do I have to create it myself?

Ok, here’s how it worked out:

I backed up the database, deleted everything and did a clean install of WP, no plugins, nada.

Categories and links worked.

Then I did a database restore. Categories and links stopped working.

So I cleared everything again. Restored posts and comments from the XML file generated by the ‘export’ function in WordPress.

Edited the backed up database SQL to only include the user table. Imported that in PHPMyAdmin.

Everything is fine now. Categories work. Links work.

Clearly whatever was broken, was broken in the database state.

Maybe… what does that do?

So if I nuke my WP install, and start from scratch, restoring my posts + comments from xml, and the users from saved DB table should be enough, right?

Another oddity – whenever I edit a post, it seems to create a new copy of the post in the database. If I carry out 7 edits, 7 copies of the post are created. Only the first (unaltered) copy is shown on the website, however.

Well… no. David Cump’s solution doesn’t work for me.

Weirdly, the links are all still there, and browse-able in wp_links. They have the category id field populated, and the link categories still seem to be there in wp_terms. However, the category # in wp_links doesn’t seem to match the category # in wp_terms.

What strikes me as bizarre is that I can add categories in wp-admin, but they just don’t seem to “stick” to the posts.

Oh, and all the links disappeared as well.

They’re still in the database – they just don’t show up on the site.