Upgrading to Wordpress 2.7 – Avoid the White Screen of Death
Anyone out there upgrading their 2.x installation of Wordpress to 2.7 like I did last night?
The infamous ‘5 Minute Installation’ took 2 hours before I put my old 2.3.3 files back on the server to stay live. After waiting 12 hours for a response from our hosting company, I finally see what caused the whole thing to come down, something not easily found on wordpress.org for the minimum requirements to run Wordpress 2.7.
If you Google around, most Wordpress White Screen of Death questions and answers revolve around outdated plugins or themes. My problem was neither. In fact, its not something the average user would think to check, or on most hosts, even have access to change.
PHP Memory Limit for Wordpress 2.7 must be AT LEAST 16MB.
We generally run all of our websites on dedicated servers where our PHP Memory Limit is well over 128MB. I was pretty frustrated with the process because upgrading Wordpress has always been tedious, prone to breaking, and simply a hassle.
I followed the instructions to a T. Mind you, without that PHP memory requirement, you won’t see anything more than a white screen. Since there was no php error output, or Wordpress error handling, how in the hell is the user supposed to know what went wrong? Instead you are lead around in the dark, moving plugins, changing themes, changing theme settings in the database…
My question is this.
Wordpress has been around for years and practically has a stranglehold on the blog market. Why then, does it have such poor error handling? Instead of a white screen of death, why didn’t I get a nice “Sorry, Wordpress requires 16MB of PHP memory to run”? Without some kind of notification there really is no good lead into what the cause may be. It’s a shame, because Wordpress is a killer app for blogs.
Why can’t the core Wordpress developers spend a week or two making an error handler / wrapper that takes care of all the basics for upgrading? I mean the most common advice is to move themes, turn off plugins, don’t copy this, don’t delete that, overwrite this. I’m sure they can come up with code to do all of that for you. Drupal can do it, Joomla can do it, Blogger can do it.
Updating should not be this hard!
Hope this helps out some of you, this answer wasn’t very apparent for me until the server tech got back the following day.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 9:42 am and is filed under Experiences, General, How-To's, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
