Dummy’s guide to solve that blank page in your wordpress dashboard

As much as I like wordpress, things do go wrong. In fact, I don’t even know what the error was because I did not see one. I couldn’t log into my wordpress admin! I had to manually and randomly delete some plugins to allow me to just log in. And then, staring right in my face, was a blank screen, in wordpress dashboard… This will rank quite high on my horror list of managing a website. I truly needed a dummy’s guide…

I am truly grateful to be able to call upon my support structure. This time, moongster came to the rescue. I had to go into the sql database to deactivate the active plugins by running sql queries… If that all sounds incomprehensible… it is, to me anyway. He had to walk me through what they are. If you do find you run into this blank page (a white screen death!), you might want to try the following.

Step 1: Go to the cpanel of your host

A lot of host should have this. You’ll need to login to your own host and find the cpanel. It’s an administration access to a lot of your website’s functionality. I’ve only been in once or twice a year, normally when something bad happens e.g. hacked, bandwidth problems… This is another occasion that I needed to login. Hope you kept your login details safe from the time you signed up with your host!

Step 2: Look for phpmyadmin or mysqldatabase

The idea here is to dive into the database. You see, all the information about anything on wordpress is collected in this vast information vault known as the database. And within this database, there are separate sub-database to identify what type of database they are. There is a sub-database on your posts, a sub-database on your comments, a sub-database on your plugins, a sub-database on what you tell the plugins to do…

Step 3: Look for that sub-database

It is this sub-database, the sub-database that tells the plugins whether to switch them on or not, that you’re looking for. Here is the sql query (a command to ask this phpmyadmin to do its thing) that you require. It will give you a list of all the active plugins, although in an incomprehensible format.

SELECT * FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘active_plugins’;

Step 4: Make a backup of it, just in case

Go to the edit function (mine is shown as a pencil). You will then see a long string of characters. Copy the text somewhere. Save it, just in case.

Step 5: Deactivate all the plugins

Now that you have backed-up the command, you can replace the whole command in Step 3 with the following.

‘a:0:{}’

This will tell this sub-database to switch off all the active plugins. Your plugins will still be intact. They are just being deactivated.

Step 6: Go back to your wordpress dashboard

You should be able to access your wordpress dashboard now and do your thing. Switch on the plugin one by one. Test your website after every plugin that you switch on. Find out which one is the culprit.

While you’re at it, make a backup of your posts. You might also want to consider upgrading to WordPress 3.0 now. That is what I did. Might as well… It’s working fine now.

Step 7: Congratulate yourself!

Have a break. Pat yourself on the back. You have just done an amazing thing with very little technical knowledge. I was quite impressed with myself, but wouldn’t have gone through this not without some help.

Subscribe > RSS > email

If you think this is worth sharing, do share it with your friends. Thank you for reading.

Related posts:

1. Another wordpress upgrade
2. Upgrading wordpress & bookmarking