Present Perfect

For all the love wordpress gets from people who care about usability I still get surprised at how incredibly unusable wordpress can sometimes be.

Since last week I was unable to log in to my WordPress installation. You'd click login, and you'd end up on the same page, and there'd be no way to log in.

Yesterday I googled a little, and apparently this is so common that there is a whole page dedicated to this.

Step 2 on that page is:
Some WordPress Plugins may interfere with the login process. Disable all of your WordPress Plugins, either through the admin panel or by removing them from the /wp-content/plugins/ folder, so they will not be recognized by the program.

Excuse me ? You create a whole eco-system built on allowing anyone to code up a plugin for your system, but you allow your system to fail silently when said anyone makes a mistake ? I am surprised I wasn't bitten by this before, but granted, I have few plugins and definitely didn't touch them the last few months.

How WordPress cannot do some simple logging or error handling when it loads up random plugins during the login process is simply beyond me.

I moved the plugins/ directory out of the way and login worked. That was the extent of the help that debug page provided - of course it doesn't tell you how you can figure out which plugin is causing the problem.

In the end it was a file called markdown.cache - yes, just the cache file. Sigh.

For all the love wordpress gets from people who care about usability I still get surprised at how incredibly unusable wordpress can sometimes be. Since last week I was unable...