Static HTML file in WordPress cause of major issues!

Static HTML file in WordPress cause of major issues!

Right I've solved this major pain in the ass!

A static HTML file in the root of my WordPress site was the cause of major issues!

I have just managed to fix a problem in Wordpress on one of my sites I run that has been doing my swede in for over a week now. You can see the thread I wrote (that no-one replied to) here > wordpress.org

Basically I use WP Super Cache for my caching and Cloudflare and everything worked fine until I upgraded to the latest verson of WordPress.

However since the 20th December 7am, my homepage was "fixed" like stone. The comments in the footer said WP Super Cache had created it but I couldn't clear it.

I disabled all plugins. I swapped caching plugins. I tried all the usual tricks of adding querystrings ?r=1212 to make the page unique, using the secret "no cache" key, adding pragma no-cache headers to the header file, ticking "no cache" on every type of file. 

Turning caching OFF, clearing all my .htaccess rules and much more as you will see if you read the post on WordPress.

However today I fixed it. I searched the root of my site and found that there was a page in the root of my site called index.htm.

I presume like IIS you set extensions and filenames that run in order of precendence so that index.htm runs before index.php and so on. This meant the htm static file always ran and the index.php file which all WordPress code has to pass through was never being called!

I viewed the source of this HTML file and it was exactly the same source as that of the homepage if I viewed it with the WP Super Cache comments and all the rest of it. The build date was exactly the same as the comments in the site. Nightmare!

I deleted this page and now the site is working again!

Why this page was cached as static HTML and put in the root of my site I have no idea.

The index.php file is the one all the WP code throws everything through with their massive overkill of PHP instead of adding .htaccess rules into the file to handle /tags/, /category/, /post/date/blah etc. If you actually look at the code that has to run on every page load just to work out what kind of rewritten URL it is - then you will CRY! 

Why not just take the users settings for permalinks and make .htaccess rules for each major branch.

Anyway I digress it seems to work for now and if anyone else has the same problem check for an index.htm file in their root and delete it. Whether WP Super Cache put it there or not I don't know but it buggered me up for 10 days sp check first!