Category Archives: WordPress

WordPress Tweak

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.

WordPress Automatic Update

Recently WordPress shipped an update to their fine blogging engine.  The version that had been in use for this blog was capable of performing an automatic update to the new version.  However, no matter how many times I clicked the “upgrade” button the upgrade would just never execute.  Some searching around the WordPress forums led me to a listing of web hosts that needed a few adjustments.  All that was necessary to enable the automatic upgrades was to tell the host via the .htaccess file in the main WordPress directory that PHP5 should be enabled.

Add the line shown below anywhere to enable PHP5 support for 1 & 1 Linux hosts:

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php