Auto Updating WordPress with 1and1 Hosting
By Lew Ayotte | August 10th, 2009 | Published in Blogging, WordPress | 2 Comments
If you have any WordPress blogs on 1and1 then you’ve probably ran into some problems with updating certain plugins, updating the blog, or even importing to your blog. The reason is because 1and1 has some issue with PHP4 but there is an easy fix. You need to hand edit your .htaccess file (located in the root of your WordPress directory). Here you will add the line, AddType x-mapp-php5 .php to the end of the file. It doesn’t matter too much where you put it, so it’s best just to put it at the end.
Let us know if this helps you out or not.
October 22nd, 2009 at 3:08 pm (#)
Hey Norm,
Glad to hear it worked for you
. On 1and1, PHP4 and PHP5 are available, but PHP4 is the default. The auto-update feature in WordPress requires PHP5 (from what I understand). So when you try to run it, it will fail if you're using PHP4. The AddType is an Apache web server command, "x-mapp-php5 .php" basically tells Apache to translate all PHP files in PHP5 rather than PHP4.
You probably had to re-login because your session on the server was stored with PHP4, when you changed to use PHP5, it no longer had a valid session.
I hope that helps
Lew
October 22nd, 2009 at 3:24 pm (#)
Wow! This worked for me. Thanks!
Can you explain a bit about what it does or why it fixes this? What is an “x-mapp-php5″ type and where does WP use it?
I saw that I had to re-login as soon as I changed it ..