Developing For .NET

You may have experienced an odd occurrence on the site today, and if so I apologize. For some inexplicable reason, the site encountered the dreaded WordPress Blank Page issue. Last I checked, which I think was yesterday afternoon, the site loaded just fine. Today, however, I noticed that the front page would not load. The index.php page produced only a blank return: a completely empty HTML document. Then I confirmed that the Admin page would load correctly.

I checked and even restarted the web server: all was well and restarting did not help, which I expected since all the other sites seemed fine. Next, I deactivated all the plugins, but since that made no difference I reactivated them immediately. I then tried reloading 2.5, but that did not change anything. Finally, I went to the admin page and changed the Theme to the WordPress Default. All of a sudden, the site showed up. I changed back to the regular site theme, and sure enough it would not load. Fortunately, I keep a copy of the Theme on my PC, so I uploaded it again and the site came back.

After going through this, I think I’ve done this once before. Maybe next time I’ll remember the solution without all the gyrations. Of course, it would be nice to not have the problem ever again. I expect to potentially have this sort of problem immediately following an update, but since it has been a couple of weeks since upgrading to 2.5 I really don’t understand the sudden problem.