Avoiding/Recovering from the WSOD – White Screen of Death

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    (@moonbatwingnut)


    17 years, 3 months ago

    I completely lost my new WP site a few days ago when I edited a Meta.php sidebar module. No biggie since it’s a startup. Replacing the Meta.php file with the original didn’t save the site.

    But just now when testing some Contact Form plugins, I got the WSOD again just by activating the plugin. I used my FTP client to remove the plugin and got my site back. But this is really worrying since there doesn’t seem to be a way to know when I might bork the site again.

    Is there a best practices for this sort of thing? I don’t presently see the need for more plugins, but you never know. I’m about to start populating the site with content and I’d like to know it’s stable, and that I can recover it.

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  • The first and only good solution for you is making backup before each step. Backup your database and your WP installation files, and if the sky falls on you, you can re-upload the backup files and got the previous (working) state again.

    Thread Starter delete

    (@moonbatwingnut)

    Thanks,

    I’ll read up on backups. I don’t control the WP installation files since my host runs that end. They recently upgraded from 2.0.10 to 2.0.2 (hey, it’s progress) without telling me, and also by over-riding my setting to manual upgrades. Then they reset my setting to automatic upgrade. When I asked about all this, they pointed to the automatic setting as being done by me, and said they’ve -always- run 2.0.2. Orwell anyone?

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