Recently I posted about the problems I had with upgrading to WordPress 2.8 and I thought I had managed to solve these issues effectively. Today, I noticed that I had further problems, including a white screen of death (WSOD), Error 404 redirects on all my posts and others. Here, I want to give you a brief note about what I did to resolve these issues.
White Screen of Death (WSOD)
When attempting to view my blog in a browser, all I got was a white screen, known as a White Screen of Death (WSOD). There is no visual display within the browser window and if you view the source code in your browser, the source looks like this:
<html><head> ... some code ... </head>
<body></body></html>
You will note that there is nothing between the body tags.
Error 404
Error 404 is a default page shown, usually by a server, when a page cannot be found for whatever reason. In my case, once I managed to get the home page back up on my site, the Error 404 page was shown whenever I tried to click on a link to one of the posts or to one of the Pages.
Preliminary troubleshooting
As always when trying to solve issues, there are some preliminary troubleshooting procedures to follow. In this case, I did the following:
- Renamed the wp-content/plugins/ folder to deactivate all plugins;
- Removed all the themes folders from wp-content/themes/ except for the ‘default’ theme; and,
- Disabled the cache.
Unfortunately, none of these worked but it is worth checking as these are easy things to fix.
Getting into /wp-admin/
One benefit of deactivating all of the plugins was that I could once again log into wp-admin by going directly to the directory in my browser.
Checking the database
The first thing I checked when I regained access was the database. Yes, it was still there! and I made a backup just to be on the safe side. I also checked the posts in the post editor and found that they were all active and published.
Plugins
Next, I went to the deactivated plugins and attempted a bulk reactivation. This showed up that wp-super-cache was causing a problem, so I deleted the plugin and ensured that wp-cache was turned off within its settings.
Themes
Checking the Themes panel identified that the Default theme was active. I moved all of my theme folders back into wp-content/themes/ and refreshed the Themes panel.
This showed that ‘There is a problem with the active theme’ and that it had been disabled. This could have been a result of moving the folder. I reactivated the theme (thematic) and checked my site. This allowed me access to my home page again.
However, when I selected a post, I was redirected to an Error 404 Page Not Available page.
How I fixed the Error 404 fault
I fixed the Error 404 problem by performing a simple check. I went to the permalink panel and changed the permalink setting to the default setting and tried selecting a post again in the browser. It worked.
This told me that the problem was with the permalinks and that I could rebuild them by going back to the permalink panel and reselecting my preferred option (custom setting: /%year%/%postname%/). Checking this in the browser confirmed that it was working.
And finally…
Going back, I reinstalled wp-super-cache and restored all other settings to my preferences. Over the next few days I will continue to test and check my site to make sure that everything is working as it should.
One final note: it is worth keeping up-to-date backups of all your site files and your WordPress database.
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Tell us about your experiences
Hopefully, my experiences have helped you to solve some of the issues you may be having with WordPress 2.8. Please let others know about your experiences by commenting on this blog. If we share our problems, it will help others to find solutions to their problems and maybe help to solve yours. Add a comment below.
