Wordpress uninstall problem

Published by Stephen | Filed under Wordpress

I recently added Wordpress to one of our websites. I went as far as creating a new layout, a few main category pages and added a few posts just to see how everything came together. I was happy with the results, but I decided to scrap the project for various reasons…

Once the decision to scrap the project had been made I removed the folder containing Wordpress from the server and removed the database from my hosts control panel. I then went back to the site to test it was working properly. There was no obvious reason why it shouldn’t be, but I like to check these things because you just never know.

It was a good job I did because the site wasn’t working properly, or at least, not when a page that doesn’t exist was requested. Instead of getting the custom 404 error page I had created I got a 500 internal server error message instead. At first I was surprised to see this message and I couldn’t figure out what could be causing it. A little backtracking over the previous days work soon revealed that the culprit was the htaccess file I had to amend for Wordpress to format its permalinks properly.

I have set up Wordpress a few times in various places, some installations have gone live, some have not. Each time I do a set up I follow this Wordpress post installation checklist. One of the requirements is some additional code that needs to be added to the htaccess file in order for Wordpress to name pages in the format I choose.

This is the code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]

When I removed Wordpress from the server I didn’t remove this code from the htaccess file. The site still worked correctly, but if a page was requested that didn’t exist the user got a 500 internal server error page and not the custom 404 error page I have created to keep people on the site. For some reason my host will not allow me to specify a custom 500 internal server error page!

I think it is important to do as much as you can to people on your website and custom error pages are one of the tricks you can use. I was glad to see this one working again!