CCGI Webspace: No access to Wordpress Admin Screen (or seemingly to any PHP script)

[#1]

I've been hanging on to my allocated CCGI webspace for years with a view to one day creating my first website or blog, initially just to see whether I can, despite having very little Web-related technical knowledge. Recently, I had some time on my hands and I also received an email from Wordpress announcing that my site has been automatically updated to WP 4.1.32. So that seemed like a good opportunity to make a start on this project.

I found initially that I could see the sample home page of my website by typing the expected URL, but after fiddling around in the Plusnet CGI Control Panel (for example, raising the PHP version from the default to 7.4), the website became inaccessible. Then I discovered how to access the WP admin screen - I assumed the URL was ccgi.username.plus.com/public/wordpress/wp-admin/. But no joy here either - it simply returned the error "Not Found [CFN #0005]", without even attempting to display the login page. Trawling through the Forum to see if anyone else had this problem, I found a suggestion to rename .htaccess in the root directory. This did the trick - I was able to see the home page again. However, I still couldn't access the admin screen or its login page.

At that point, having failed to find any further suggestions on either the Plusnet or WP forum that actually worked, I decided to update WP to the latest version (5.6), in the hope that this would provide better compatibility with PHP 7.4. So I worked my way through the manual update process (after deleting everything in the old WP area except wp-config.php). The last step after the upload of all the files would have been the upgrade of the database. Unfortunately, when I tried to run the upgrade script, I just got the usual Not Found error. Also, the WP admin screen was still inaccessible, again giving the Not Found error. Moreover, my website's home page was now no longer accessible either, even with the .htaccess file renamed.

I now suspect that PHP may not be running on the server and hasn't been all along. Does it need activating somehow, or what? Or perhaps things won't work until the database is upgraded - but the upgrader won't run...

Does anyone have any ideas?

[#2]

The PHP options in the control panel alter the .htaccess file, so have a look at that.also, have a look at message 21 in this thread: https://community.plus.net/t5/Everything-else/CCGI-Webspace-PHP-version/td-p/1714422/page/2

[#3]

Thanks for responding. Sadly, none of this helped. In the control panel's PHP Manager, I looked at the options available, but none of these seemed relevant to my problem. So, just out of curiosity, I set display-errors to On and clicked Save. This resulted in a php.ini file being created in the root directory as a reflection of the five option values in PHP Manager, and also the following line being added to .htaccess in the root directory:

 SetEnv PHPRC /services/webpages/c/c/ccgi.username.plus.com/php.ini

This seems to be setting some kind of environment variable, presumably used to tell PHP-CGI to use the php.ini file on that path for its configuration. The lines above that in the .htaccess script are as follows:

 Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
 # Turn mod_rewrite on
 RewriteEngine On
 RewriteBase /
 RewriteRule ^cgi-bin(/.*|)$ CGI-BIN$1 [L,NC]

 Options +ExecCGI
 AddHandler cgi-script .cgi .pl

As per Andy's post in your link, I commented out all of these original lines but it made no difference. I'm still getting the usual error "Not Found [CFN #0005]" wherever I try to go on the website.

Rob

[#4]

Could anyone please help? I'm still unable to access either my website or the login/admin page. When I type in the URL of the site, it redirects for some reason to ccgi.username.plus.com/wp-admin/install.php and I get a blank page with "Not Found [CFN #0005]". I get the same error message whenever I try to access any .php file in wp-admin. It's as though PHP isn't running...

[#5]

Correction: today, it no longer redirects, but unfortunately everything else remains the same.

[#6]

The overall structure of my test site is as per attachment. Please note that there are two "phpmyadmin" directories: the one in the root is empty. Does the whole structure look normal?

[#7]

I managed to fix the problem by renaming .htaccess not only in the webspace root but also in the /public/ directory. So, I can now access both my website home page and my WP admin screen. However, looking in the Control Panel, I see that the PHP Version box has now reverted to "Select version", which is how it was originally before I changed it to 7.4. Does this mean that I'm now back to PHP5 or some other default? If so, should I stick with that (assuming it's still supported by WP), or is there a way of getting everything to work with PHP 7.4? My WP Dashboard is urging me to update PHP for security and performance reasons, but I'm loath to do so if I'm just going to lose access again as a result.

[#8 · Accepted solution]

I went ahead and updated to PHP 7.4. To my surprise and delight, I was still able to access everything after that. What puzzles me is that the update created a new .htaccess file in /public/ with the same content as the old one I had renamed. This implies that the actual presence of that file had in fact nothing to do with pages not being accessible. Maybe its removal had caused something to happen elsewhere, which in turn made everything work...