My WordPress “White Screen of Death” fix.

Posted on: Sunday, April 11th, 2010
Category: Blog, Featured

If you’ve stumbled upon this post because your searching for a way to fix your WordPress “White Screen of Death” website then you just might be in the right place. Today I experienced this dreadful feeling for around 60 troublesome minutes and I managed to fix mine in a matter of 1 hour while others spent days and months. Let hope my way works for you.

My problem all started when I was making a small modification to the the file “wp_includes/widgets.php”. I opened this file, made a small irrelevant-edit, ftp to the server, refreshed my browser and “POOF” the screen goes blank on the front-end of the site and the back-end too. I was crippled. No PHP error -no source code -nothing. Here’s how I fixed it. First, I reverted my changes to “wp_includes/widgets.php” that didn’t do anything. Then, I changed my WordPress back to it’s “default” theme by modifying the database.

To do this follow the steps below:

1. Go to cPanel or web host panel and click on phpMyAdmin link.
2. Select your wordpress site db.
3. Select the ‘wp_options’ table (if you have another table prefix ‘tableprefix_options’).
4. From the header tabs, select the “Browse” tab.
5. Select ‘Page 2′ from the tables footer.
6. Now you’ll see another tables and you must edit  the ‘template’ and ‘stylesheet’ tables with the name of your theme. Complete like below and press go, and you’re done.

At this point my website is back up but with the wrong theme. When I switched back to my customized theme i get the “WHITE SCREEN OF DEATH”. The problem obviously lies within the “wp-includes/widgets.php” so I knew the problem was relevant to the core files and at the time I was running WordPress 2.8. It was then I realized it was time to upgrade WordPress so I figured this would be the perfect time to do so. I went ahead and upgraded to version 2.9 -UREKA! I found my fix.  I switch back to my custom template and all was well.

To sum it all up… If you see the “WHITE SCREEN OF DEATH” after modfying a core file and in my case “wp-includes/widgets.php”; make sure too:

1. Change your theme back to the “Default” via “phpMyAdmin”.
2. If you need to upgrade your WordPress website -DO SO!

If “my fix” does not work for you, I found the following links during the troubleshooting of the problem that I recommend you visit. They are as follows:

• http://www.velvetblues.com/web-development-blog/my-wordpress-blog-is-blank/
• http://silentbits.com/wordpress/blank-page-with-wordpress-howto-fix-that/