Random and Erroneous Wordpress Redirect

Question

Would somebody mind postulating and possible reasons why their is an automated redirect on my homepage that adds /admin to the URL.

Please visit www.divethegap.com/update. You will see that it instantly redirects to /admin and does not load the page. There is a folder called admin that is not accessible to a user, but their is no redirect to it anywhere on the site.

What is going on. I have removed all recent function additions in the theme and unistalled plugins. There are several include-template-paths that I use but I don't use any redirects.

What has caused this.

Any ideas?

Marvellous

HT ACCESS //

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /update/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /update/index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

Answer 1

If the redirect comes from WordPress code, you can find out who is calling wp_redirect() by hooking into it:

add_filter( 'wp_redirect', 'wpse12721_wp_redirect' );
function wpse12721_wp_redirect( $location )
{
    // Get a backtrace of who called us
    debug_print_backtrace();
    // Cancel the redirect
    return false;
}

Answer 2

Just some days ago I've written a blog post that shows an easy way How to Debug Redirect Problems in WordPress:

• Install the Better HTTP Redirects (Wordpress Plugin)
• Enable WP_DEBUG = TRUE

You will then get information of the redirect URL, automatic redirects are disabled and you find a backtrace to see what caused the redirect (file + line).

Answer 3

By a process of elimination we have determined that the error was caused by the plugin REDIRECTION.

This plugin has now been removed.

I must point out that it was never used and certainly never set up to carry out that action. I can only imagine that somehow the creation of themed files must have had similar names to the plugins files. After checking the plugin file names that is also not the case.

This remains a mystery. It was only through trial and error that we determined that it was this plugin causing the problem.

If anyone has any theories I would like to hear them.

Case closed