I’m trying to upgrade an old wordpress installation for a friend. I’ve got the following setup:
- remote LAMP live server running 2.8.5 WordPress
- remote LAMP test server, currently horked after an attempted manual update from 2.8.5 to 3.3.2.
- local MAMP server to replicate test server
I started out overconfident, because, hey, I’ve done this before, no problem. So I started with the seven step manual update instead of the extended manual update instruction. (Mistake #1: I don’t have a full backup of the test server, just the wp-admin and wp-includes, though I have the theoretically identical live server to pull from if necessary.)
White screen of death. OK, I probably deserved as much. I turned on debugging and made sure there was a writable debug log file. Still blank screen of death. Disabled the plugins. Still white screen.
So I duplicated the live server back to my local MAMP server, to get a functional 2.8.5 mirror, then updated it to 3.3.2. Success: sort of– it failed in the exact same way, so I could debug it. Turns out the update required a default theme to be separately uploaded. Yay! When I added the theme, I see output to the log file, I see a happy blog page. Switch the themes back: broken, and no logging.
So I go back to my test server, remove all themes but twentyeleven. No luck. OK, twentyten. No luck. The same default theme used in my local version. No luck. I now have a debug enabled (but no logs generated), plugin-free, default-themed manual upgrade with a white screen of death.
I double-check all of the SO threads, WP help threads, etc– yep, I’ve done everything they suggest. So instead of debugging core files one by one, I started over: copied the functional WP install from my local server (which should be identical to the dysfunctional remote WP install) to the remote test server (I see the expected “can’t connect to db” message), update the wp-config, and see… nothing. WSOD.
There is something that is making this code work on my local server and blank in a non-debuggable way on the remote server. Can anybody point me towards something else to try?
If all else fails, I guess I’ll do a manual install of 3.3.2 instead of the upgrade, but I’m leery of that for the live server.
Check your admin area also, not only front side. (go directly to admin URL)
It is probably a themes problem .
Even if you put another theme inside the folder – you will still need to activate it , because on the DB it will still be the old theme marked as activated.