Troubleshooting the Wordpress Blank Page

I was in the midst of a theme change for one of my blogs and when I selected a particular free Wordpress theme, the whole blog came crashing on me. White Screen!!!! I knew that the template was faulty, and I quickly deleted it. And, I knew that if I did so, Wordpress would pick up the default theme instead.

(If you don’t like stories, jump ahead to the text in bold for the resolution technique)

But, to my surprise, the blank page persisted. Huh! I had no idea what to do next, so I deleted all the Wordpress files and re-uploaded them, hoping that it would just fix the problem, sans wp-content and wp-config.php. Problem still continued. So, I decided to do away with wp-content and replaced it with Wordpress default. Still, no change and I did the same with wp-config.php as well, vis-a-vis.

I was close to my wits end and finally I started to think logically not before carrying out some illogical troubleshooting steps. How does wordpress know that I have changed a template? It cannot be in one of the files on the server as I have not given write access to Wordpress on my server to any of the files. So, it had to be the database. Something must have gone terribly wrong with my database.

So, I started searching online to understand where Wordpress stores template information on the database. To my horror, I could not find a single, I mean a single resource that contained this information. I found this post which was on the same lines but did not cover my problem.

Well, it was time for me to put in some solid hours to troubleshoot the issue at hand. I went into my database and started peeking around hoping to find an entry that reminded me of a template. Alas! nothing even close. As I studied the table structure, the only table that came close to carrying this information was wp_options.

Before I did anything crazy, I went ahead and created a new database and checked if Wordpress installation screen shows up. Bingo! It did. I was certain that it was my database that had gone bonkers.

This is what I did to fix the problem, and it did. I dropped the wp-options table from my original database and replaced it with wp_options from the default Wordpress installation. This did the trick but I do not know yet, what other damage it has done in the process. But, I am glad that all my posts, comments, tags and categories are still around.

This was my closest shave to losing all my effort that was built over the past few years. I believe that there is still a whole lot of ambiguity about Wordpress. That being said, it is still manageable, I say it because a person like me who is a non-programmer could get into the code and change stuff and could look into the database and understand the ambiguity of code-dom. Surely, code must be poetry for these folks.

Related posts:

1. Of Wordpress Upgrades and Plugin Compatibility – you do not have sufficient permissions to access this page
2. Self Hosted Wordpress Blogs Under Attack
3. Howto : Add Ads After First Post on your Wordpress Homepage
4. Howto : Decrypt Wordpress Footer
5. 2010 is the year of open source design for WordPress

Filed Under: Wordpress

Tags: Wordpress