After updating the site to WordPress 3.0, I found that I couldn’t make automatic updates to the site using WordPress.  A little bit of Googling found a possible answer.  Basically, WordPress is confused about whether PHP 4 or PHP 5 is available.  WordPress needs PHP 5 for automatic updates to function.

The answer found by Googling didn’t work for me.  In fact, it actually made things worse.  It made it so that the site would not accept an HTTP POST to log in.

I started to comment out updates made to the .htaccess file for the site and found the correct update for my hosting provider.  Add the following to the site’s .htaccess file (all of the usual caveats about making backups apply):

# Make sure that PHP 5 is being used for the WordPress auto upgrade

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

That’s it.  That’s all that was need to enable automatic updates.

Tags: WordPress