For a long time individuals have been having difficulties because of the WordPress blank screen of death. It would appear that there are many issues that can cause your WordPress install to become corrupt. After deleting the wp-config file, the core site files and removing, installing, activating and deactivating plug-ins, scouring through days worth of blog posts … manyhave come up empty for a resolution to the dreaded problem. However, the situation with our installs might have been found.
We fixed it using the advice of a developer who said to log on to the server through a bash shell and upgrade WP through bash.
In a nutshell, the problem seems to be from transferring files to my server through FTP… for some reason the files are not getting to the server in the right condition. So, I decided to follow the directions for the bash install of WP…
It's definitely worth learning Linux shell commands from here on out … as soon as the command was run, the damned tarball was downloaded. The files were then decompressed in a flash by simply running
tar -xzvf http://wordpress.org/lastest.tar.gz
This was a way faster upgrade than doing it the "traditional way", and the problem disappeared!
Additional note: This is likely because of white spaces appearing after the close PHP tag (?>) in includes, which can happen when editing those files. The fun part is, those close PHP tags aren't technically required by PHP, so if you remove them whenever you're editing, you'll never run into an error like that.
Alternatively, if your site has a lot of plugins, this could be causing it as well. Try disabling those plugins through the database if none of the above works.
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