Solution to the Wordpress + Chrooteded Apache + email notification problem

If you are running Wordpress on a chrooted Apache you may find that the email notification facility in Wordpress no longer works.

Why is this? Wordpress uses the sendmail binary to send those emails. When Apache is chrooted that sendmail software is not longer visible. Hence it fails.

This becomes a problem when you first install Wordpress because Wordpress fails to email the blog username and password to you. Wordpress is installed but you can’t log in.

In this scenario you will need to to reset the admin password via mysql with this method.

You can then log in and use the blog but unfortunately since the email notification does not work you will not know if comments are left unless you check manually.

Solution

Install the wp-phpmailer plugin for Wordpress to enable Wordpress to send email via SMTP instead fo the sendmail.

Sorted!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 10:29 am and is filed under Tools, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.