WordPress 2.7 Bug: Blank Home Page and High Number of Posts to Display
Posted December 13th, 2008 @ 03:46pm by Erik J. Barzeski
I just wasted well over an hour upgrading The Sand Trap to WordPress 2.7.
The problem appeared as most WordPress errors do: I had a blank page. The twist to this one? Only the home page was blank. Other pages worked just fine. I could set my "About" page to act as the home page if I wanted and it would display.
It wasn't a theme problem, because I tried the default WordPress theme and ran into the same issue. I re-uploaded the files several times. I checked the permissions. I removed some whitespace from my wp-config file. No luck and nearly two hours down the drain.
Then I stumbled onto the solution: I had to change "Blog pages show at most 9999 posts" to 999. Or 1000. But not as high as 2000. 1250 works too. I didn't spend time figuring out what number broke WordPress.
The problem with this is that my theme file already sets the number of articles to nine: $posts = query_posts('showposts=9');. I have a high limit set because I'd like archive pages to show everything without pagination. WordPress 2.6 accepted 9999 as valid - WordPress 2.7 does not.
The Sand Trap has 2099 total posts.P.S. I've updated this bug with a brief note detailing my solution.
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Posted 21 Dec 2008 at 8:21pm #
My maximum is set to 10 (far below 1250) and I'm still getting the blank home page, with all other pages working fine, so there must be something else that causes blank home pages. I added the following code...
ini_set('display_errors','1');
ini_set('display_startup_errors','1');
error_reporting(E_ALL);
... to /index.php in an attempt to get whatever errors might be occurring instead of a completely blank page, but I still get a blank page. Any suggestions???
Posted 11 Mar 2009 at 1:17pm #
I am a totally new to WordPress. Yesterday I downloaded and installed 2.7.1. After a few changes in configurations I got the same problem: blank pages. Thanks to Mike Landis I could see the error information. My problem was due to the last space character in a theme file. Apparently I am a little bit luckier than you guys 😆 .
I don't know why the code didn't work in Mike's case. But i strongly believe the blank page must be caused by PHP run-time error. So try you best to get the PHP run-time error message so you can have a clue.
Posted 11 Mar 2009 at 2:01pm #
It was a caching issue. I deliberately broke something in WordPress' main page (I forget now, maybe it was index.php) and tried to access the site. Browser couldn't load it, but I think in the process also cleared the cache. I unbroke the page and the site returned to normal. There are other posts about solving caching problems (some by me, where I posted the solution earlier). Sorry, but I don't remember where.
-Mike