Image by Dan Shirley

Out of the countless WordPress installations I have, it is very, very rare that I can’t login after an upgrade. It happened to me once and it was to this very blog. Now this blog is not protected by aMember or anything like that so it was very strange. In the end, I found it had something to do with screwy old files. So I did a brand new install, dropped the new database, copied the old DB into the new and it worked. It also cleared out a bunch of other stuff. Usually problems like these you can find help over in WordPress.org forum

The problem is, when you are using it in conjunction with another system like aMember. That’s when they and most opensource projects will tell you “that’s not supported” in other words, tough luck. Well that’s exactly why I do what I do for our clients. Today, I had an issue exactly like this from a client who had been trying to upgrade to no avail for a while. This really peaked my interest because I know that the person who did the upgrades for her is not a newbie when it came to scripts. Furthermore, I don’t like to be beat by any script. I took the job.

My first few attempts proved unsuccessful. I checked in the database too for weird options or leftover stuff. Plugins were all disabled. This is not a plugin issue. I dove into wp-config.php added the salts and secret keys etc no go. What could it be. Taking another look in wp-config.php it seems like the issue was the cookie paths that aMember advises you to add.

define('COOKIEPATH','/');
define('SITECOOKIEPATH', '/');
define('COOKIEHASH', md5($_SERVER[HTTP_HOST]));

I knew that had to be the problem. Sure enough it was. Taking that out cleared the issue.