Help! My WordPress install is borked and I don’t know how to fix it or even where to begin looking

This question is actually inspired by the support thread over at the WordPress Support Forums regarding a percieved bug in the Autosave feature in WordPress 2.1. In that thread, things got very heated as one camp was distraught while the other camp was trying to figure out what was going on and couldn’t duplicate the problem.

The rules of thumb when troubleshooting – whether yourself or by asking in the support forum, mailing lists or via consultants such as myself, is to provide the most complete information possible.

For instance, whether for WordPress or any other software, try to ascertain:

1. Plugins installed and versions
2. Theme used
3. Browse, OS, version numbers
4. Firefox extensions used, perhaps
5. Can you reproduce on a different computer?

In the case of this support issue, it seems to me there is a plugin run afoul and I provided this approach:
Disable ALL plugins – particularly ANY plugin that MIGHT have javascript in use. Does this solve this problem? (Note: it will probably create errors on the template because now plugin functions aren’t available – don’t worry when you reactivate those things will be fixed).

If that fixes the issue, take the divide and conquer approach and reactivate half your plugins (that you were using). Does the problem come back? If no, activate half of what’s left. Repeat and rinse.

If you activate plugins and the problem does return, focus on that group of plugins. Deactivate half of them and check for the problem. Does it occur? Yes? No? And so on until you find the culprit.

If none of this solves the issue, kick your theme over to Kubrick (though I doubt this is a theme related issue since the error is in wp-admin but for due diligence, follow through and check it out).

I am 99.999% sure you will find the culprit.

Be methodical. Provide detailed info on how to reproduce.

I have a site that is a non blog site and I want to add a WordPress blog and allow the rest of the site to benefit from feeds, users, etc from the blog itself. Is there any easy way to do this?

Absolutely, this is a simple process. I’ve had a number of people ask me how to do this over the past year and a half or so. Depending on what your ultimate goal is, there are three options. Choose your poison.

Option 1: Limited Integration

The first option is the easiest and requires no code modifications. In fact, it is as simple as uploading the blog to a separate directory (i.e. ~/wordpress) and following the normal routine of installation. The only difference is that your blog permalinks will look like this: http://www.example.com/wordpress/.

Following this method, you could then place permalinks into place on the non-blog site manually. This is beneficial if you don’t anticipate the need for a lot of dynamic blog content outside the blog.

Option 2: Permalink Integration

The next option you have requires a small code modification but will give you access to all of WordPress code and internal API for integration into the site. After uploading the blog to the non-root directory (i.e. ~/wordpress), simply copy the wordpress index.php file into the root directory of the site. Modify this code in the file to point to the correct code

require('./wp-blog-header.php');

becomes

require('./wordpress/wp-blog-header.php');

You can verify that this modification was successful by browsing to the new index.php. If there are no errors reported and the blog loads, then you’re good to go. Now just go and make appropriate modifications under the Options page of wp-admin. The blog address field should be appropriately updated.

Incidentally, if you have your own index.php page, you can add the code from the WordPress index.php file to the top of your own file. No harm, no foul.

Option 3: WordPress as a Content Management System

The final option you have could be a topic in itself: WordPress as a CMS. WordPress provides options that allow you to define custom templates for specific pages or allows you to define a specific post or page as the home page – from within WordPress!

Richard Sipe has a great write up on how to do this. If you would like to manage your entire site, both blog and non-blog, from within the easy to use interface that is the WordPress admin – this is your solution.

What can/should I do to protect, secure, backup, etc.?

Earlier in this series, I answered the question about migrating to a different host. In that article, I gave an overview on how to backup your database.

Technically, you can use the same instructions to backup your blog. Do a database dump via phpMyAdmin (ask your host if you don’t know how to use this) and FTP your files down. You could also, if your adept and have the necessary SSH access, setup a cron job to run a script that will dump your database and archive it along with all your files on a daily or weekly basis.

It might seem like I’m dodging this question, but that is only due to the fact that there are lots of ways to do this.

Instead, I’ll talk about backups in general. Whenever you make any major changes to your blog ecosystem, you should back up your database. That means, whenever you upgrade, move to a new host, close down a blog – back up! You don’t know if you’ll need that data again.

Failure to backup, and subsequently messing something up, does not constitute a WordPress problem. :-)

What advantages obtain from direct tagging, whether manually or by widget, vice using the WP category?

This question comes from James Joyner.

This is a widely-held debate, so I’ll provide my own opinion. ;-) As far as Technorati, and perhaps Google Blog Search is concerned, WordPress categories and tags are one and the same. However, there is a deeper semantic difference that affects users as well as information architecture. In fact, I think we’re on the brink of seeing more tagging-related services that treat tagging differently than categories. WordPress 2.2, for instance, will have tagging in the core in addition to categories.

From a birds eye view, I generally describe categories as filing cabinets. Posts go in different filing cabinets based on politics, sports, web development, local restaurant reviews, etc. However, tagging is much more granular. For instance, there might be a local restaurant that the Baltimore Ravens frequent after practices. Tagging, semantically, allows you to label that post in a more granular way: “nfl ravens restaurant microbrewery”.

This takes another level when you get outside of posting – and this is more of an abstract philisophical argument. Maybe the future holds tagging of blogroll links (There’s already XFN, but I digress), or tagging of other people’s content (think del.icio.us). What if there were a way to use internet-wide tagging to essentially fingerprint someone’s tendencies?

Conversation can be linear in a standard blog format. Post 1 with comments about post 1, followed by Post 2 with comments about Post 2. Hyperlinking has always created a way to de-linearize conversation but it is only effective to a degree. If you think about it, tagging reflects the actual human thought process and behavior. How often do humans only think and talk about a single topic – yet, on blogs, thats exactly what happens. One post, with comments. Second post, with comments.

The second part of the question deals with actual implementation – widgets, tag clouds, etc. To me, this is secondary to the actual tags themselves. While Technorati does respect WP categories as tags, it also handles tags themselves, if they exist, as a separate entity as well. In the end, we’re going to see many implementations, but taxonomy as a whole poses a huge windfall to bloggers who choose to use them.