08.07.08
Solution to Wordpress Blank Screen of Death
As I posted last week, getting my blog hacked forced a wordpress upgrade to v2.5.1 however it also caused a problem I had previously been unaware of, the Wordpress Blank Screen of Death. This is basically where under some circumstances, you get a blank plain white screen instead of the page you were looking for. In my case, I was completely locked out of the admin screens and could do nothing with the blog apart from post comments!
This post is going to take you on a journey, one that starts with following standard debugging techniques that I’ve learned from years of experience in the IT industry and ends in a discovery so surprising, it’s made me question the fundamental quality of the whole blogging phenomena that is Wordpress (Wordpress is the blogging software this crossfit blog uses and is arguably one of the most popular). I started off as anyone should when faced with a new and unfamiliar problem, by doing some research:
What I found was that this appears to be a common Wordpress problem suffered by many bloggers and can arise in many possible situations e.g.:
- After writing a comment and clicking Submit.
- Accessing any of the main blog screens.
- Accessing any of the administrator screens.
- After *doing* something in the administrator screens.
During the upgrade, I noticed I was suffering from (4) above. I could access the admin pages no problem, but whenever I tried to do anything adminy I’d get the Blank Screen of Death e.g. change a plugin setting or write a post or change anything. The action I was performing worked ok, but I’d have to hit the back button and do an F5 Refresh to see the results of it. At the time I figured I’d deal with it later.
It was made worse because there were no error messages: No errors on the wordpress white screen of course; nothing in the main wordpress error.log; nothing in the plugin error log; and nothing in the webserver apache error log. And in the absence of any information it’s a tough problem to debug. However, with my advanced level Google Foo, I was pretty confident of finding the answer. I did in the end, but it took me hours!
Here are all the causes and working solutions I found on the net that others have specified:
- A partially complete upgrade – Solution: Re-upload the upgrade files.
- FTP Client making a mess of the upgrade – Solution: Get a better FTP client and re-upload the upgrade files.
- Something failed running /wp-admin/upgrade.php upgrade script – Solution: Find out what failed (check logs), fix it and re-upgrade.
- Incompatible Plugin Enabled – Solution: Disable all plugins, then add them back one at a time to see which one causes the problem.
- Adding the new define(’SECRET_KEY’,… parameter into wp-config.php – Solution: Don’t put it at the end of your file, put it before the line that says /* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */
Working down this list posed a problem: How could I disable the plugins without access to the admin screens?!? In the end I had to manually hack the MySQL database directly via the back end. In short, here’s what I did:
- Accessed my webserver admin screens, cPanel in this case.
- Accessed the phpMyAdmin MySQL user interface.
- Browse the wp_options table.
- Find the field called: active_plugins.
- If you just want to look without the risk of cocking it up, here’s the SQL you need:
- SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘active_plugins’ LIMIT 1;
- First things first before you go fiddling: BACK UP THE VALUE OF THIS FIELD by copying to a text file on your PC.
- Then either us phpMyAdmin to blank the value of the active_plugins field, or use this SQL:
- UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = ” WHERE option_name = ‘active_plugins’;
- Just to be clear here, if you don’t know what you’re doing, then don’t do it! I’m not responsible for you messing up your blog even more. You should have regular backups and have proven to yourself that they work and you are competent enough to restore from those backups.
Anyway, that will disable all your plugins… great. Just one problem: it didn’t fix my Blank Screen problem!
I’ll cut a long story short, as it did take me another hour or 2 to finally find the solution. Now what I’m about to say is a complete shocker to me. As an experienced IT person, someone who has been messing around with and programming computers and working on IT projects in every possible role up to IT Director for over a decade, I am completely dumb founded by what I’m about to describe, because how the human race has got to 2008 with all the technologically related advances we have made, and yet still introduce a hugely powerful and popular program like WordPress, that is brought to it’s knees by the most innocuous of things… it’s just completely beyond me.
Anyway here is the answer: it lies in the wp-config.php file, this is the file where you set your database password etc (so you’ll forgive me for not using my own real one. 
). This is the example file that comes with the installation:
— File Starts —
<?php
// ** MySQL settings ** //
define(’DB_NAME’, ‘putyourdbnamehere’); // The name of the database
define(’DB_USER’, ‘usernamehere’); // Your MySQL username
define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ‘yourpasswordhere’); // …and password
define(’DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value
define(’DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);
define(’DB_COLLATE’, ”);// Change SECRET_KEY to a unique phrase. You won’t have to remember it later,
// so make it long and complicated. You can visit http://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.0/
// to get a secret key generated for you, or just make something up.
define(’SECRET_KEY’, ‘put your unique phrase here’); // Change this to a unique phrase.// You can have multiple installations in one database if you give each a unique prefix
$table_prefix = ‘wp_’; // Only numbers, letters, and underscores please!// Change this to localize WordPress. A corresponding MO file for the
// chosen language must be installed to wp-content/languages.
// For example, install de.mo to wp-content/languages and set WPLANG to ‘de’
// to enable German language support.
define (’WPLANG’, ”);/* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */
define(’ABSPATH’, dirname(__FILE__).’/');
require_once(ABSPATH.’wp-settings.php’);
?>
— File Ends —
That is a perfectly fine, normal and working wp-config.php. Now I’m going to show you a broken one. One so terribly horrendously broken, that it causes you to be locked out of your workdpress blog for half a week and lose 1/2 a day trying to solve it. See if you can spot the difference:
— File Starts —
<?php
// ** MySQL settings ** //
define(’DB_NAME’, ‘putyourdbnamehere’); // The name of the database
define(’DB_USER’, ‘usernamehere’); // Your MySQL username
define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ‘yourpasswordhere’); // …and password
define(’DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value
define(’DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);
define(’DB_COLLATE’, ”);// Change SECRET_KEY to a unique phrase. You won’t have to remember it later,
// so make it long and complicated. You can visit http://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.0/
// to get a secret key generated for you, or just make something up.
define(’SECRET_KEY’, ‘put your unique phrase here’); // Change this to a unique phrase.// You can have multiple installations in one database if you give each a unique prefix
$table_prefix = ‘wp_’; // Only numbers, letters, and underscores please!// Change this to localize WordPress. A corresponding MO file for the
// chosen language must be installed to wp-content/languages.
// For example, install de.mo to wp-content/languages and set WPLANG to ‘de’
// to enable German language support.
define (’WPLANG’, ”);/* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */
define(’ABSPATH’, dirname(__FILE__).’/');
require_once(ABSPATH.’wp-settings.php’);
?>— File Ends —
What do you think, can you see it the mistake that breaks the whole blog? No? Go back and look closely…
Still no? Ok ok, I’ll give it to you, here’s the problem:
What? You can’t see that either? Let me show it to you again, look carefully this time:
You getting it yet? Yep, it’s an empty line. That’s all it is. 1 single solitary NewLine at the bottom off the file, right after that ?> a Carriage Return & Line Feed in programmers speak. That’s it. You hit the Enter key in one wrong place and the whole pack of cards comes tumbling down! Shocking, just shocking. Let me be crystal clear, it’s this bit here:
?>
— File Ends —
Now of course, the Analyst in me wants to know how this happened and I’ll tell you. The issue was the the new define(’SECRET_KEY’… entry I mentioned before. That should have been my warning, because when I was following the upgrade instructions, they don’t tell you where to put it, so naturally I first put it at the end of the file…. yep you guessed it: AFTER the ?> . I realise now of course that was stupid and it didn’t work. What was the symptom of it not working? You guessed it: the Wordpress Blank Screen of Death.
But when I moved it to the correct place, I was still sporadically getting problems, then I commented the line out and basically with all the changes I made I seemed to have got myself into the situation where I was getting the problem, but only half the time. I reckon the currently open admin session I had going was probably masking half of the issue from me. But in putting it at the end of the wp-config file and then moving it, I must have left behind an empty line. How silly of me! So just make sure you have no extraneous characters after the ?> I’d recommend checking for those evil and nefarious spaces too.
Anyway, that’s the fix and probably the most comprehensive study of getting wordpress blank screens anywhere on the net. If you find this post useful, please consider linking to this post from your blog, it will help others find this article who may have the same problem.
Cheers.
STOP SPAMMING THE FORUMS said,
July 8, 2008 at 8:33 am
WTF? a cpl times is fine. GET A FCKING GRIP.
Diane Vigil said,
July 8, 2008 at 11:49 am
Yep. That falls under the “stuff happens” scenario. Been there.
Roanoke VA real estate said,
July 8, 2008 at 6:54 pm
Dude, bless you. You just saved me a lot of friggin hassle. I guess my google foo helped me fine you! Cheers and many thanks!
Charco said,
July 9, 2008 at 12:49 pm
bloody brilliant – I just spent the best half of eight hours trying to sort this out. I’ve been in and out of the database, up and down the MySQL and permissions ladder…
All I can say is THANK YOU VERY MUCH
Kathy said,
July 10, 2008 at 12:50 am
I’m getting the blank screen problems after editing/managing/creating a ‘page’ (but I can post a regular entry just fine) – but I’ve never done the secret key bit… but the repair is usually replacing the wp-config.php file just as you describe. I’ll watch for an extra empty line, but it doesn’t make any sense to me. Great work, though!
Colin McNulty said,
July 11, 2008 at 7:00 am
> STOP SPAMMING THE FORUMS
Dude, when I was trying to find the solution to my own problem, I went through the Wordpress forums in detail and found many MANY people with the same problem and hardly a soul helping them. I resolved to go back when I was done and post replies to all the people that needed help but hadn’t received it.
If I was spamming the forums I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t have needed to if so many people hadn’t had the same problem and not received help from anyone else.
jasper said,
July 11, 2008 at 7:44 am
man i have this same problem at my website..
http://www.maddecent.com
if anyone can help us solve it we can compensate
thanks!
jasper.goggins@gmail.com;
Alex said,
July 12, 2008 at 11:30 pm
Hiya,
I have the same problem, but after first install… not much help from wordpress support forum (instead of a reply, one of their lovely moderators closed my thread because he’d mistaken me for another user).
I had a look for that infamous last line and sure enough, it was there. Removed it, still no joy.
Any ideas where the bug could be? I use Dreamweaver’s built in ftp.
Thank you!
Colin McNulty said,
July 13, 2008 at 8:51 am
Jasper and Alex, I would suggest a reinstall / re-upgrade process. There are many things that could be wrong, just start again and work through slowly.
Lee said,
July 15, 2008 at 4:49 am
I’m having this problem when I try to run install.php. I have tried completely reinstalling from a fresh installation without any luck (two or theree times). I have also tried your suggestion, but it didn’t work for me. Also, I have made the following observations:
1) The original wp-config-sample.php file has the extra carriage return at the end! So this is very unlikely to be the real cause of the problem, and as I said, it didn’t work for me.
2) I have PHP error logging enabled, and I got the following error each time I loaded install.php:
PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_ENCAPSED_AND_WHITESPACE, expecting T_STRING or T_VARIABLE or T_NUM_STRING in [URL removed for security reasons]/wp-admin/includes/media.php on line 154
Hence, the problem would actually appear to be with /includes/media.php.
Interestingly, line 154 is blank – just a carriage return. I’m going to try removing it and see what happens. Or maybe there’s supposed to be an “else” or something there. Any PHP experts here?
Anyway, it appears there is some kind of error in the 2.5.1 version of /includes/media.php.
Lee said,
July 15, 2008 at 8:58 am
Well, I’ve been messing around with 2.5, 2.5.1 and the just released 2.6, and no matter what I do, when I try to install any of them, I get the same blank screen and the same PHP error from /wp-admin/includes/media.php. The only difference with 2.6 is that the error now occurs on line 197 (I’ve discovered that my text editor counts the lines differently from WP, so I’m no longer sure which line this actually is).
However, I noticed 2.3.3 and earlier didn’t have this file, so I decided to try installing it. Voila! It works!
So I was obviously installing it correctly, but there is clearly a serious bug in the code of /wp-admin/includes/media.php (from WordPress 2.5 upwards).
As this file relates to the new admin interface, it explains why some people are getting blank admin screens after upgrading to 2.5 and later, while other people (like me) simply can’t install it in the first place.
I am going to need some very serious convincing that this bug has been fixed before I even consider “upgrading” to a newer WordPress version.
2.3.3 has the extra carriage return at the end of wp-config-sample.php BTW, so I am quite convinced tha this is not the real cause of this issue.
Colin McNulty said,
July 15, 2008 at 7:28 pm
The plot thickens…
To be honest there are always going to be sporadic problems with an install base as large as WordPress, but the lack of error reporting and handling is a shame.
Laowai Chinese 老外中文 » Blog Archive » Sorry for the white out said,
July 17, 2008 at 11:30 pm
[...] you tried to visit in the last 48 hours or so, you would have seen nothing on this site but the White Screen of Death. I just got it sorted out by upgrading to WordPress 2.6, but I have a feeling the addition of the [...]
Michael Liu said,
July 18, 2008 at 9:07 am
Hey Man, You really has done something great, it works.
Simon said,
July 18, 2008 at 6:09 pm
I had my share of blank page distraught.
See my write-up at http://simos.info/blog/archives/706
John Miller said,
July 18, 2008 at 8:26 pm
Not working for me. My wp-config.php file is fine – no extra space, everytime I try to post and click submit, it goes to the …/post.php file and locks up at a blank screen. I thought that maybe is was a chmod permission problem. I’m about ready to just uninstall/reinstall.
Ap said,
July 18, 2008 at 9:54 pm
For what it’s worth: try to set your theme to the base theme. Worked in my case.
hanjra said,
July 18, 2008 at 11:28 pm
Hi, can you please tell me how to deactivate all the plugins in wordpress 2.6. I dont see the above mentioned string (command) in the wp_options table.
My problem is that whenever i try to login, i get blankscreen. I cant do anything to get in. please help me.
hanjra said,
July 19, 2008 at 12:00 am
Thanks god, the problem has been resolved. it was all due to a plugin. I deleted the recently installed plugins using ftp client and now i can login and get into dashbaord.
I am telling this for others help.
Colin McNulty said,
July 20, 2008 at 6:38 am
Plugins are often causes of this problem it seems. One of the things I tried was to move all my plugins out of my plugin folder via ftp.
Dan McComb said,
July 20, 2008 at 11:39 pm
Thank you! I lost about an hour trying to figure this bastard out, and after removing the extraneous line break in the wp-config file, it worked all dreamy. You rock.
Marty Martin said,
July 22, 2008 at 4:17 pm
I just started having this problem again today and I notice now that in FTPing to the site, the file has been chown’d to 99 99 instead of the correct owner/group of user1/group1
I wonder if there’s a way to look in the logs and find out what script did that and track the problem that way?
The Book of Brian » Blog Archive » We lived through the dreaded White Screen of Death said,
July 27, 2008 at 4:20 am
[...] as pointed out by Colin McNulty in amazing detail over at his blog (http://www.colinmcnulty.com/blog/2008/07/08/solution-to-wordpress-blank-screen-of-death/), the automated Wordpress upgrade.php script appears to add an extra line in the wp-config.php [...]
Howe said,
August 1, 2008 at 4:05 am
You have a page this size for explaining it was a blank line ?
You must have plenty of time for blogging.
This was a bug, fat waste of time, and of course it didn’t help at all.
The Blog Idea said,
August 1, 2008 at 8:07 am
In my case only a few of the user blogs get blanked. Please suggest.
The Blog Idea said,
August 1, 2008 at 8:14 am
If you click on some of the links to the user created blogs, the pages appear blank.
Kyle said,
August 1, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Thanks for the effort. Reloading all of the files worked like a charm.
WordPress 2.6 upgrade issues and fixes - Adwords articles said,
August 1, 2008 at 12:37 pm
[...] Blog main and admin screens are all white following the upgrade [...]
The Blog Idea said,
August 1, 2008 at 9:24 pm
My problem of blank pages was solved by logging in as admin on my wordpress mu blog and clciking on “upgrade”
Colin McNulty said,
August 2, 2008 at 6:08 am
> Howe said,
> You have a page this size for explaining it was a blank line ?
> You must have plenty of time for blogging.
Not really, but I put effort into subjects that either I care about or bother my greatly. Losing access to my blogs admin screens bothered me greatly.
I also discovered that there were loads of other people out there with the same problem and helping others solve the same problem I’ve solved, is something I care about.
Bengt said,
August 2, 2008 at 9:20 pm
I got blank screens on some of my blogs after upgrading but not on others. It worked with the standard themes like Classic or Sandbox but not with my own themes. My problem turned out to be caused by some extra spaces in those themes functions-files.
Tim said,
August 10, 2008 at 3:22 am
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I would have never discovered the problem.
Steve James said,
August 10, 2008 at 3:32 pm
I had the blank screen after comment submit problem. No errors reported, no logs, nothing.
Above, Ap said set the theme back to Default. Out of desperation, I did so, but didn’t expect this to help. What’s the theme got to do with submitting a comment? Well it worked!
I was using the Orange Techno theme; no plugins, fresh 2.6 install. Geesh. Wordpress is a breeze to set-up but the diagnostics are pants.
Niaomi said,
August 13, 2008 at 9:26 pm
I’ve checked my config file and it doen’t have a gap, it isn’t broken. I’ve also delated all my plugins but my screen is still blank after I make changes.
Any help appreciated.
I am so design orientated, I cannot bare this!
Colin McNulty said,
August 14, 2008 at 5:24 pm
As you will have discovered Niaomi, there are many reasons for the Word Press Blank Screen of Death, you just have to keep taking things out till it suddenly starts working.
Sam Hooker said,
August 19, 2008 at 9:15 pm
Pardon my saying so, but isn’t the issue you’re describing more of an issue with the PHP interpreter (Apache mod_php, in your case), rather than the codebase? I mean, it seems like the problem is PHP bailing without sufficient error handling (i.e., posting a message in well-formed HTML to the browser). Sure, it’s sloppy code if the WP upgrade script is appending a spurious newline to the config file, but the greater failing here is that of the interpreter. IMPO, anyway…
Jeremy said,
August 19, 2008 at 9:25 pm
Hi Colin,
Thanks for your write-up. I read your post, and seeing as how you noted that cleaning up the active_plugins field didn’t fix things, I skipped it. Silly me. My problem was IN that active_plugins field. My host actually helped pinpoint it. Not sure how it happened, but the last plugin folder contained in the serialized list had an address that looked like this: ‘../../../../../[about 20 times]../tmpZnlkjP/something…’ …It looked like junk.
I carefully reviewed the entire contents of the field in a text editor, and stripped out that reference. Once I had done so, voilà! My site was back online again.
So if someone else is reading this,
DON’T SKIP DISABLING ACTIVE PLUGINS VIA THIS METHOD OR ANOTHER.
-Jeremy
Sam Hooker said,
August 19, 2008 at 9:48 pm
Colin,
I appreciate your posting, too. Unfortunately, in trying to troubleshoot my upgrade to 2.6.1, the issue was the fact that I hadn’t copied over an alternate theme (into …/wp-content/themes). If folks get this far in your process and are still at a loss, I’d encourage them to look into whether they’ve brought over any alternative themes that may have been in use. Thanks to the folks posting to http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=9168
Cheers,
-sth
Anthony said,
August 20, 2008 at 10:38 am
My problem started when I installed a few wordpress themes and started testing the look and feel. I lost everything – admin panel- the lot. I cant rem which one caused the blank screen but when I went into the themes folder I just deleted all of the themes bar the default and all was restored.
Jusy incase that helps anyone….
Mel said,
September 1, 2008 at 5:54 pm
Re-upload wp-includes foler and that will fix the blank admin page problem. I haven’t narrowed it down to which file is causing the problem but I know 100% it’s inside the wp-includes folder.
James said,
September 5, 2008 at 10:43 pm
Thank you so much!! My issue was simple, I just activated a wordpress plugin that was not compatible, so I had to go into my FTP client and delete it. I was freaking out. The whole reason I was working on one of my older blogs was because an article got picked up by stumbleupon and I was trying to capitalize. I jump on there and I still have Wordpress 2.1 running. I want to get it up to par so I need to update. I try starting out with one of those one-click back-up plugins and boom, everything is white. My site is a blank screen, my admin is a blank screen, everything.
Luckily I googled “wordpress blog sunddenly blank screen” and I found this up near the top. Your blog gave me a solution to my problem in less than the standard 96 seconds most readers spend on a page, and for that I thank you!!!
Colin McNulty said,
September 9, 2008 at 8:24 pm
Thanks for the comments guys & girls, it’s nice to know this post has helped people. If any of you fancy giving me a back link, feel free.
Aaron said,
September 11, 2008 at 5:14 pm
Hello Colin,
Great article. A few questions:
We are having similar problems with http://www.marksdailyapple.com. White screen of death at seemingly random times. Some browsers show the site while others don’t at all (WSOD) and comments don’t work. And here is the kicker it isn’t the same browser on different computers that it doesn’t work on. For example, it won’t display on FF3 at work but will on my computer at home.
In our panic effort to fix the problem the first time we re-uploaded all the wp-includes files. This fixed the problem temporarily (for about a week). Since then we have narrowed it down to a single file – kses.php in wp-includes. That is, if we have the WSOD and re-upload that single file the site functions normally again… for awhile.
We have the latest version of WP and and about a dozen different plug-ins.
Also, and this may be the most relevant bit of info, we recently moved our site to a new host. Our last server was hacked. The hackers were able to get into our files, add hidden text, and also redirect our URLs to spam (mostly porn) sites in search results. This problem was, ostensibly, fixed by our developers but with our trust in our old server lost we jumped ship. Ever since then the WSOD problem has been happening (started about 3 or 4 weeks ago and has happened about a half dozen times now).
Our WP developers can’t seem to find a solution. They’ve thought it is some weird cache problem. They are now telling us the root of the problem lies with our host.
Any thoughts, suggestions or help would be appreciated.
Colin McNulty said,
September 11, 2008 at 9:25 pm
Hmmm that does seem to be a mystery.
Aaron said,
September 15, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Update:
This was our problem –
Logic on the timing of the issue seems to point to a problem with something on the server. In doing some more research into your new server’s config, there is a PHP optimizer called eAccelerator that seems to be causing segfaults with wordpress. Here is the bug report:
http://eaccelerator.net/ticket/216
You may want to ask the host to check into this and either disable it or find a work around. This is a high probability due to the eAccelerator bug with the kses.php file.
We disabled eaccelerator and the problem has stopped.
Cheers!
Colin McNulty said,
September 15, 2008 at 7:23 pm
Wow, that’s an esoteric cause indeed!
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Bjørn said,
October 22, 2008 at 8:41 pm
Hello! i tried WP for the first time today, after installing i can manage my page in dashboard, but my page is blank. non of the above helped me:S
Lee Kemp said,
October 25, 2008 at 6:32 pm
I’m getting the blank screen but i’m not upgrading, i’m simply failing miserably at my first installation. I’ve checked for the blank line and i’ve tried uploading with a different ftp client.
Any help much appreciated.
sharon said,
November 22, 2008 at 8:54 am
There are other reasons this can happen that are not WP’s fault, you know. The white screen can be a sign that you’re running out of PHP memory. That’s something that will appear in your server logs, and it basically means you have a cheap web host that is setting the PHP memory limit very low. After some messing around I managed to get an existing installation to upgrade. But I can’t install a new WP database. I can’t install Mediawiki either: same blank screen. I’ve also had problems with a different PHP-based program at the same site. The ’support’ staff tell me there’s nothing wrong. (And the crucial difference between the support at my web host and the WP support is that I pay my host.) Looks like I’ll be moving to a new web host in the near future.
PT-LawMom said,
December 6, 2008 at 6:40 am
You are awesome. Thank you SOOOOOO much!!!
Wordpress leere weiße Seite nach Installation - Digitale Probleme said,
December 17, 2008 at 2:07 pm
[...] es leider viele, häufig liegt es wohl aber an fehlerhaften Plugins. Weitere Ursachen sind hier und hier [...]
MarkS said,
December 31, 2008 at 2:38 pm
You saved my blog. Thanks!
Fort Lauderdale SEO said,
January 13, 2009 at 10:39 pm
I have had this problem for a very long time … The thing is … I have the exact same WP theme and files on other servers without a hitch … however, the admin area gets whiteouts for various reasons when I have more than one plug-in activated … I have heard the “canned” solution a hundred times
“upgrade WordPress”
It does not help … I have no idea why the theme would work fine on one server and completely whites out on another …
I have no idea why this issue persists after trying every suggestion given …
For What It’s Worth … WordPress doesn’t appear to be very stable …
That’s my 2 cents ..
Kelly said,
January 19, 2009 at 2:27 am
I had a problem with viewing errors, so I added:
php_flag display_errors on
to the .htaccess file.
Then I saw that there were files missing on my server. Seems like my wordpress upload decided not to complete its job!
I walked through and added the missing files (such as some media.php and admin.php ones) and then it worked!
Luke said,
February 24, 2009 at 9:08 pm
This saved me big time! My site was down and I couldn’t figure out for the life of me what caused it. Thanks a ton!!!
Philip Arthur Moore said,
March 3, 2009 at 7:10 am
Thanks for the excellent writeup. I’d say the first thing to check for after any upgrade is the extra carriage return in wp-config.php. I just had the white screen of death and a quick check yielded the extra space at the bottom of that file. Clean that up before trying anything else!
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Hello webmaster
I would like to share with you a link to your site
write me here preonrelt@mail.ru
Colin McNulty said,
March 3, 2009 at 8:50 pm
No worries Philip. Alexwebmaster, all links are welcome.
lordjz said,
March 13, 2009 at 5:04 am
After trying all suggestions above, the only thing that worked immediately for me was to manually delete the plugins that I had installed. Deactivating them wasn’t enough. Its good to list them (numbered as you install and activate them), then you will be able to delete them sequentially one by one (starting with the last), until the screen of death goes away.
Sorry cannot post my blog url as yet because I still have to get a new Domain name.
Zak said,
March 14, 2009 at 12:36 am
Thanks a ton man! My Wordpress 2.7.1 powered blog was just completely crippled due to that one extra space. The odd thing was that I didn’t do any recent upgrades. All of a sudden my admin area just went blank. I owe ya a beer, or six,
Cheers,
Zak
Colin McNulty said,
March 15, 2009 at 9:47 am
Lol, no worries Zak. A mere mention and link back from your blog is all the thanks required.
Mike Adams said,
March 16, 2009 at 9:00 pm
Thanks, Colin! After moving my site to a new host, I suddenly had the white screen of death when I would log in. I couldn’t do anything!
Sure enough, there were two blank lines at the end of the wp-config.php file. I deleted them and everything works again.
Cheers,
Mike
mal haskins said,
March 18, 2009 at 8:35 pm
AHHHHHHH!
The single line white screen of death in the config file …
Mi Amigo – thank you for posting up this informaiton – you saved my day!
Mike said,
March 27, 2009 at 9:09 pm
I just spent 2 hours uploading and reuploading the wp files, all the while ignoring my recently updated config file. Thank you so much for finding this. You just saved me a weekend of frustration!
RaiulBaztepo said,
March 28, 2009 at 10:46 pm
Hello!
Very Interesting post! Thank you for such interesting resource!
PS: Sorry for my bad english, I’v just started to learn this language
See you!
Your, Raiul Baztepo
PiterKokoniz said,
April 7, 2009 at 11:22 pm
Hi !!
I am Piter Kokoniz. oOnly want to tell, that your blog is really cool
And want to ask you: will you continue to post in this blog in future?
Sorry for my bad english:)
Thank you:)
Piter Kokoniz, from Latvia
Matt said,
April 10, 2009 at 9:45 pm
Another tip – you can try renaming all of your plugin folders through your ftp client. change ‘foldername’ to ‘foldername1′.
I did this and it solved the white screen issue.
Andrew said,
April 15, 2009 at 4:31 am
wow it works, thankyou thankyou, i thought it might spend hours looking for this!
Ben Q said,
April 24, 2009 at 3:21 am
I just fixed this issue differently. I got the blank screen of death after jumping from an upgrade from 2.3.3 (or so) to 2.7. I went in via FTP and deleted the current theme, was able to login, and change the theme to another one, and wah-lah, it now works.
Fun stuff!
Wordpress still rules.
MMcD said,
April 28, 2009 at 9:11 pm
You are so right – I got the blank screen after messing around with the function.php file in my theme – I was doing really well, but then all of a sudden I got the blank screen any time I edited a page or post and then clicked update – this happened to me before and I started fresh (a real time waster). However, doing a google search came across your article here on it…and I reckoned I must have messed up the function.php file when I was trying to add some stuff to it…..sure enough at the very end there was a lovely line space before the final ?>
I removed the linespace and then tried to edit and update a post and voila no more blank screen.
so be careful when adjusting those important template files…………….
thanks for sharing your post
Colin McNulty said,
June 16, 2009 at 8:26 pm
Thanks for everyone’s thanks, it is appreciated. Link backs are also appreciated.
Someone hold my hand, I’m about to upgrade to Wordpress 2.8… I’m just stepping outside, I may be some time!
Kristina said,
June 19, 2009 at 11:20 pm
I got the white screen on my main wordpress blog page after changing web hosts and they moved my account for me. I assumed it was something regarding the new installation but didn’t know where to look. The wp_config.php file seemed fine. Turns out, after reading the comments here, I went to the admin theme manager (typed the url directly) and lo and behold, there was a notice at the top of the page that the current theme was broken and it was reverting to the default. Well that obviously wasn’t working, so I selected another unmodified theme and wow, back to life. Funny thing is, when I then selected the same modified theme I had before, it worked just fine.
Ricker said,
July 1, 2009 at 6:09 am
I had this same blank page disaster post-upgrade to 2.8.
My solution, however, was not to delete the extra lines (although my wp config and some other files DID have the extra line….)
The problem for me was the PLUGINS. Some were not compatible with 2.8 and i can’t believe that it could just BLANK OUT the entire site, INCLUDING the admin area!
To solve this problem.. (using an FTP program) i renamed my “plugins” folder to “plugins_old”. Then I reuploaded the default “plugins” folder from the wordpress install files.
Voila! Blog is back!
Abhijeet Patil said,
July 1, 2009 at 5:03 pm
I tried all possible ways to fix this award winning issue… lol … and tried this. . Go to your phpmyadmin edit table (wp_xx_options)
Method 1:
If your ( template & stylesheet fields are showing ’str’ value ) edit them and make default and default . That works …
Method 2:
Execute this code paste it in index.php
Abhijeet Patil said,
July 1, 2009 at 5:04 pm
… Execute this code paste it in index.php
Abhijeet Patil said,
July 1, 2009 at 5:05 pm
$updatetemplate=”update wp_options set option_value=’default’ where option_name=’template’;;
mysql_query($updatetemplate) or die(”Could not update template”);
$updatecss=”update wp_options set option_value=’default’ where option_name=’stylesheet’;;
mysql_query($updatecss) or die(”Could not update css”);
Abhijeet Patil said,
July 1, 2009 at 5:07 pm
some corrections in method 2:
Execute this code paste it in index.php
$updatetemplate=”update wp_options set option_value=’default’ where option_name=’template’;
mysql_query($updatetemplate) or die(”Could not update template”);
$updatecss=”update wp_options set option_value=’default’ where option_name=’stylesheet’;
mysql_query($updatecss) or die(”Could not update css”);