The Redirection plug-in by John Godley has a bug in its current version of 2.1.28.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/
The WordPress Redirection Problem
I changed the permalinks on this site one day and hadn’t noticed that I had already gotten indexed from Google which held allot of outdated links. Well, I found out Google had an issue accessing these pages through the Google Webmaster portal. So from this site I created my redirects and all was great for a week or two.
Overall I like the plug-in and AJAX is always nice for inputting shorts pieces of data. Once I made a change to one of my pages all of a sudden I noticed my front page forwarding to the link I made. I disabled the Redirection plug-in and my problem went away.
The Fix
After looking through the Redirection settings I found setting that was responsible for messing up my front page.
Tools –> Redirection –> Groups –> click edit group to the right of “Modified Post” –> uncheck the Enabled box and save it.
Deep breath after the fix
I’m glad this worked out you just can’t have your front page going to a 404. This has got to be very close to a fatal error in terms of how a visitor will see your sites reliability at that moment. The feature that is faulty in this plug-in is the auto 301 creation process that should take care of forwarding permalinks when you change them in a post or move an article to another section. I thought this was a good feature but the publisher should probably disable it by default if it is not.
Did this fix your problem? Let us know by leaving a comment.
It just keeps us inspired !-)
Thanks a ton. This almost ruined my entire weekend. All I did was publishing a new page and suddenly that page turned up as my home page. Deleting it just brought up 404. Gaaah! Not knowing what had happened, as I never had issues with this plugin before, I attempted a full restore of my site, to no avail. Then, what I should have thought of in the first place, I deactivated all plugins, and found the culprit. But since I rely heavily on Redirection, having had my site up since 1998 with different URL structures over these 12 years, with Google-indexed backlinks dating way back, I didn’t want to be without it, so with the help of Google I found your post. I did the fix, and all works fine. Pheeeew…
I saw a suggestion on WP forums to just get a new plug-in. That suggestion did not consider production sites like yours that have been around for more than a year with a database of redirects already in place.
Hey thanks this helped and fixed the problem!
Thanks, whew… this was a nightmare.
This fix worked perfectly, thank you!
I added a fresh redirection after upgrading to WP 3.0.1 today and then bam my homepage was redirecting. Luckily the plugin page on WordPress.org linked to a help thread which referred me here.
Thanks again
here’s a short post on what worked for me:
http://www.wpopti.com/homepage-redirects-post/
just had this same issue and all I had to do was delete the / redirection within the modified posts group.
not sure why but / was being redirected to the most recent post. deleted it and all is fine now.
Uff! What a relieve! Thanks so much. God Bless You!
Thank God for your Post and advice. I was at a loss and starting down a rat hole to try and fix myself! I hope others can benefit by your tip and let’s hope the plug in can be fixed soon…..thanks so very much !!!!!
Hi Ed, Glad to assist !-) Let’s stay out of those random rat holes.
Thanks! I am so happy that you shared this easy way to fix this problem!
Cheers!
Jonas
Hi Jonas, Glad to offer this fix in time to matter for you. I started to delete the plug-in but I wanted to keep my redirects. So it worked out for all of us.
Thank you! This was exactly the solution to a problem I started having yesterday after making some changes to my site–I have a static home page set, and it had started redirecting the home page to the most recent post instead. I followed your instructions, and it looks like things are working properly now.
Hi Jessica that’s great, I noticed people advising others to edit their databases and thought I would offer a clean solution for the time being until the plugin is fixed. Nick