Cry? Laugh? I did a little of both with a good ol’ soblaugh. So, yeah. WordPress 3.9 wreaked major havoc on some of our WordPress Multisites, and I can only breathe again now that I rolled them back to 3.8.3.
Here are the two hair-pulling scenarios I encountered in case you bump into these too. You are not alone!
Case 1: WordPress Multisite with www in the domain (ex. www.domain.com) using subdirectories.
When going to the subsite (ex. www.domain.com/he), I got a 404 error.
When going to the Dashboard for the subsite, www.domain.com/he/wp-admin, I couldn’t get to the subsite’s Dashboard. I kept getting redirected to the main site’s Dashboard.
However, when I looked in PHPmyadmin, the whole database was still there.
Possible solution: Check in the database if in wp_site and wp_blogs that the domain has www.
Related issues: There is a related ticket that has to do with mixed case path but since my subsite doesn’t have mixed case, I created a new ticket but I don’t know if anyone else had this issue.
Case 2: WordPress Multisite with non-www in the domain (ex. domain.com) using subdomains.
When I tried to go the subsite (ex. subsite.domain.com), I got redirected to this url: http://subdomain.domain.com/wp-signup.php?new=subsite and this text displayed on the page “Registration has been disabled.”
Solution: You probably won’t believe this but the solution was adding a slash. Literally, a / into the Path in the network admin. If you go to network admin > sites > edit site > info, the second line is Path. Add a forward slash: /
Bless the people in the forum!
Related Issues: The closest ticket I could find in the WordPress trac was this one that deals with Multisite www getting treated as a subdomain, so I left a comment.
The non-conclusion
I so wish I could say “in conclusion”, but unfortunately, I don’t know what to conclude at this point since it seems WordPress 3.9 is breaking some Multisites in the most mysterious ways. Since I couldn’t wait for 3.9.1. to be released, I backed up these sites, and rolled them back to 3.8.3 by replacing the core WordPress files except for wp-content, htaccess and wp-config, and now everything is back to normal.
Here’s to praying that 3.9.1 fixes these issues!
