WordPress 2.5 can’t login; blog broken; debian sucks

I just tried to upgrade WordPress to 2.5, and the whole blog broke; when I got it half fixed, I couldn’t login as admin any more and instead got the following error – and here’s how to fix it:

The page isn’t redirecting properly
Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.
* This problem can sometimes be caused by disabling or refusing to accept
cookies.

Note: Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 is still a truly crap web browser, and instead of giving a helpful error message, it just … crashes. So, if you’re using MSIE and your browser crashed trying to login to wordpress, you now know why…

Anyway, on to the solution:

“I use the admin-ssl plugin to secure my WordPress admin area, but unfortunately changes in WP 2.5 broke it.”

Yes, folks, anyone sane enough to try and prevent hackers stealing their blog passwords, and who therefore installed admin-ssl, will now potentially find themselves locked out of their own blog. Fortunately, the lovely bengreen has also provided a fix (which WORKS!).

Steps to fix (for the truly panicked / stressed / confused):

1. SSH to your server, go to the wordpress directory, then cd wp-content/plugins
2. delete the old, broken, admin-ssl: rm admin-ssl.php
3. download the new admin-ssl and save it to this directory (I prefer to do it direct from the commandline using lynx, if you have lynx installed): download is here (that’s version 0.67, there may be a newer one by now, you can check on bengreen’s blog)
4. Go back to your admin pages and login – should Just Work (because wordpress is very good at instantly picking up admin changes)
5. Go to the “Plugins” page from the navbar, and check that you have the new Admin-SSL enabled, otherwise your blog is insecure once again

And for the cause:

Check out bengreen’s post

Finally … why does Debian suck? Um, I’ll do that in a followup post (if at all … it’s a rant against the maintainer(s) of the Debian WordPress package, who haven’t upgraded the main wordpress in a LONG time, and have a buggy, undocumented, extremely hard to comprehend proprietary system that prevents you from setting up a wordpress blog if you are a Normal Person. I fell afoul of some its bugs tonight :()