Contact form broken with particular permalink structure

[chrisgeary]

Anyone know how to debug the Wordpress email function? I'm not getting anything in the usual logs and my contact form just spins when I hit submit now.

 

[chrisgeary]

I've backed out and I'm now back in 2.8.4 and its still broken. I've no idea where to look on my unix system to even get a clue as to whats wrong...

 

[Richard King]

- What version of PHP is running on your server? If it is PHP4, get PHP5 enabled
- Is it e-mail via a plugin, or the core wordpress fileset? If it is a plugin, back up the data base, deactivate the plugin, reactivate it and try again. If this doesnt woerk, uninstall it, and download the plugin again. Reinstall, activate and try again

 

[chrisgeary]

PHP Version 5.2.4-2ubuntu5.7

Its the core email php function. Interestingly I can send a test email through another contact form, and when I create a preview contact form page, that works too, but as soon as I publish the page, the new form also fails to send email. Its as if my permalinks are breaking it.

 

[chrisgeary]

Confirmed. Using custom permalinks in the format /%category%/%postname%/ breaks contact forms. Nice.

 

[Richard King]

PHP Version 5.2.4-2ubuntu5.7

Its the core email php function. Interestingly I can send a test email through another contact form, and when I create a preview contact form page, that works too, but as soon as I publish the page, the new form also fails to send email. Its as if my permalinks are breaking it.

May mean the DB is slightly corrupted. You could:
1. export your posts
2. do a clean install of WP
3. import your posts and drop on the templates
4. reset the plugins back up

 

[chrisgeary]

Result! Setting my permalinks format to: /index.php/%category%/%postname%/
resolves the issue.

I assume this will still be reasonable search engine friendly?

 

[KayJay]

Try resetting it back to what you had and see if it works now. I've never heard plugins braking because of permalink structure. If a plugin relied on permalink structure I find it hard to believe that it would make it into the official Wordpress plugins directory.

Sometimes all it takes is deactivating all plugins and reactivating them again. In fact, when you do a Wordpress upgrade you are recommended to deactivate all active plugins before running the upgrade process.

 

[KayJay]

I use /%category%/%postname%/ for my permalink structure. You don't need the index.php. Take it out and try again and let me know what happens.

Also, in your General Settings, your wordpress url shouldn't have index.php in it, if that's what you have take it out of there.

 

[chrisgeary]

I set it back and the contact form sat there spinning again.

There is definitely something weird with the permalink thing. I know I shouldn't need index.php ahead of the structure but it seems to work for me.

I followed PATHINFO in this technote:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

 

[chrisgeary]

Damnit.. the comment form is broken now. (I didn't test this last night)

 

[KayJay]

What contact form plugin are you using?

 

[chrisgeary]

At the moment, I'm not. I'm using the standard one that comes with Wordpress.

 

[chrisgeary]

fail. they went into the spam folder. duh!

 

[KayJay]

lol. Honestly, I'd try and use the form plugins to avoid that sort of thing. It might be going into the spam folder because it thinks someone is spoofing your website. Does your form use any form of SMTP authentication when sending out emails?

 

[KayJay]

Oh. Just a suggestion, but if you have a gmail account you can use the gmail smtp authentication and have emails being sent to you from your contact form using your gmail address.

 

[chrisgeary]

Thanks, will give that a go.

No the spams were me testing with the word test and nothing else. I guess the spam checker was doing its thing