WordPress 3.7 broke site

Try renaming the theme’s folder that you’re using to something like “themname-old”. That should force WordPress to switch themes to one of the default themes.

I deleted the twenty thirteen theme I had been using on the site, as well as the twenty twelve. There is a theme already in the themes folder entitled default. how do I ensure that wordpress uses that one or will it automatically use it, seeing as it’s called default?

“default” is a very outdated theme – assuming that’s what that theme is – https://www.ads-software.com/themes/default

You need to have a clean/new copy of twentythirteen in there.

so I just download it to my computer, then shift it from the local site pane in filezilla to the remote site pane?

How do I designate twenty thirteen as the theme to use?

Put only that theme in the theme’s folder on the server – WP will use it.

But that may not fix the problem – if not, do a manual update:

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Updating_WordPress#Manual_Update

the manual upload instructions are tell me to deactivate plugins. how do I deactivate plugins from the filezilla pane? I have right clicked the files but there is no deactivate option.

Rename the plugins folder to plugins.HOLD

the instructions are also telling me to upload all loose files from the root directory of the new version to my existing wordpress root directory.

what does this mean? what are the loose files?

What is the wp-config-sample.php file and where do I find it?

Thank you

Loose files means files that are not in a folder.

wp-config-sample.php is in the WP folder you downloaded.

I have gone through all of these steps but still have a white screen on my site. what else can I try?

I found the following solution in another forum topic: add this into the capabilities.php file:

require_once (‘pluggable.php’);

My site is back up and running, though I have lost most of the customizations and will have to get these functional again.

3.7.1 will fix it however it’s a plugin problem.