Wordpress fatal error handling tips
Last Saturday I was implementing some new plug-ins on my website when suddenly the screen was just coming blank with no errors, just blank. I was using Firefox (FF) so I started trying other browsers with no luck; the whole thing was so weird to me that immediately I though was a hosting issue. I called my hosting company like 4 times, they advice me to reinstall. I tried two new Wordpress installations, one with version 2.2.1 and another one with version 2.1.3. Both cases gave me the same error, a blank page of death.
I yelled at my hosting providers rep. without reason and this is why I’m writing this post, I’ll be giving tips to follow when your Wordpress install fails. I’m going to talk about two plugins, now keep in mind that because they messed up my Wordpress install I actually don’t know why. There’s can be one million reasons for my Wordpress to fail, other plugins, my theme, previous plugins holding SQL tables that are no longer valid, only God knows. Whatever is your problem with Wordpress, I’ll advise you to trust Wordpress forums.
The first plugin that caused fatal errors on my install was sideblog.php, sideblog can be found at http://katesgasis.com/. The plugin seem to work like a charm on the owners website, I tried it and try and try. My Wordpress install was so messed up that it was affecting other installs in the same domain name, so the problem spread so deeply that even when installing Wordpress on other databases they wouldn’t work. Side blog is a terrific concept and when implemented can give your website good up to the minute content that your reader will love.
One tip to follow when installing this plugin and other related, test your site, over and over. Remember that some Internet Service Provider (ISP) tend to cache websites, therefore you might not see the problems right away. Another tip is to check your page with an xhtml validator; usually http://validator.w3.org/ will do just fine. Test your page before, during and after implementing a plugin. And wait a couple hours if everything went right and test again.
The other plugin was googlereader.php, which can be found over at http://nothingoutoftheordinary.com/. Now, I don’t really know which one of these made it worse, but I try them separately and every each time my site failed. The worst was not being able to see where the error was because the page came back blank. No testing, nothing could be done; again I’m not saying that these plugins are bad. They did not worked for me and the results made me a miserable person for a couple of hours.
My take on this is that I’m not trying them again, not even out of curiosity, if you come across them and would like more feedback from me, email me at lumencreativegroup (at) gmail.com for all your questions. Apply these tips to all of your installs, test and re-test every time you change something, trust me you will not regret it. Thanks.
Related posts:
- IntenseDebate is Intensively Great
- WordPress 2.7 is Awesome!
- Firefox 3 and WP-Stats
- Reading Blogs About SEO for Bloggers
- Automattic Release Akismet 2.1.1
