I do all of the development work for an SEO/MMO program over at thekeywordacademy.com. As part of the program, we’ve put together a system that facilitates guest posting on other members’ sites easily. That’s all well and good – but one problem we run into fairly often is this: For whatever reason, the posts table on a site goes down, and the owner’s posts are all suddenly gone – without a trace. Naturally, they get pretty worried, and an email shows up in my inbox (or in our forum).
The good news is: it’s almost always just a simple myIsam crash – easy to fix, and no data loss. After going through this a number of times with various members, I decided I really ought to put together a quick tutorial on how to fix it.
First – how do you know this is the issue you’re seeing? The most obvious symptom is this: Your posts have just disappeared. The homepage of your blog is giving a 404 (but a pretty one, with your theme), or just telling you it can’t find any posts. You log into your dashboard, and much to your dismay, the edit posts screen is showing not ONE single post. It’s terrifying, because it’s at exactly this moment that you realize you never installed that backup plugin (or more likely, you started to, but never finished, because it got tricky). Much cursing later, you’ve resigned to the fact that all is lost.
Of course, it’s likely that all is not lost – lets look at how to make sure.
To get this done, you’re going to need to get direct access to your database somehow. There are a number of ways you can do this, ranging from the super nerdy (command line/ssh access), to the moderately nerdy (MySQL gui client like Sequel Pro), to the entirely accessible – the web based interface of phpMyAdmin. I havent run across a host in recent times that doesnt give you access to phpMyAdmin in some form, so that’s what we’ll use here.
First, you’ll need to get into phpMyAdmin. I can’t give you much help there, because it’s a different process with every host. If you’re having trouble, get to your control panel, and just start searching for things – start with “phpMyAdmin”, but if you can’t find that, move on to “MySQL”, “Database” – things of that nature. You’re bound to get on the right track soon enough.
Once you’ve got phpMyAdmin opened up, you’ll end up at a screen that looks vaguely like this:
On this main page, you’ve got a list of databases off to the left, and lots of information and settings you don’t need to worry about in the center. You need to choose the database that is running the WordPress install in question off on that left column, and click to open it up. (If you’ve got a number of WordPress installs on one server, this could be a bit tricky. Check out the settings in your wp-config.php file if random guessing doesn’t do the trick).
Now that you’ve chosen your database, you’ll see the list on the left has changed – now you’re looking at tables inside the chosen database instead of databases. Click on the wp_posts table to open it (note – it’s possible that this is something other than wp_posts, especially if you’ve got multiple installs in one database. The table you want will definitely end in “posts”, and whatever comes before that can be found in your wp-config.php file – look for “$table_prefix = “). Clicking on the posts table will either pull up a page describing the contents of the table, or an error message, that looks something like this:
Surprisingly, this is good news. Your precious posts are just one command away.
Finally, the juicy bits. To repair the table, we’re going to need to run an SQL command on the database – and to do that, we’ll click the “SQL” tab near the top of the page. Doing so should bring up a page with a box that looks something like this:
As shown in the screenshot, you need to enter this:
repair table wp_posts;
In case you hadn’t guessed – if your table didnt start with wp_, you need to adjust that command accordingly.
Double check that you’ve typed the command in properly, and hit “Go” (bottom right of the input box). If all went well, a moment of loading later, you should be presented with this screen:
And with that, you’re back in business. Check your site, and your posts should be back. In some cases, the wp_posts table isnt the only one that goes down, so as long as you’re in phpMyAdmin, you might double check to see if any of your other tables need some TLC from your newfound database administration skills.
On the off chance that none of this worked, the table wasn’t crashed, or repairing it didn’t fix the problem, there’s a fair chance you’re in serious trouble. For problems with that, or any questions along the way, get in touch here, or drop me an email.
Good luck!
Update – All this post disappearing have you hankering for some backup help? Have a look at this post about How to back up your WordPress blog
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