I’ve been debating about whether or not I should bother to write up an entry about this particular situation. Why? Because it has an obvious solution! Read on to see why…

The situation: After moving a website from a staging server to its production counterpart, an issue was encountered. When logging into ExpressionEngine, nothing happened. The form submitted, but brought me back to the login page again. It wasn’t a database issue — the config file was correct and the login screen acknowledged when passwords were incorrect.

Was it a missing htaccess file or incorrect index.php / admin.php files that don’t point correctly to the admin panel? Nope!

What I failed to mention was that the ExpressionEngine version being used on staging was 2.8, whereas the production server was using 2.7.

This means that on production, the files were from a 2.7 install and the database was from 2.8. As we all know, that’s not a wise thing to do.

The solution? Upgrade the 2.7 files to 2.8.

It may seem obvious, which is why I considered not writing about it, but it’s a situation that may be encountered and one that doesn’t have too much information available.