The famous Wordpress white screen of death - wordpress

Question

Like mentioned in the title, i think this is by far one problem Automattic or Wordpress team cannot solve until no matter what version Wordpress will go in future. In this question, i am focusing to the white screen of death that i get whenever i want to activate certain plugins. I am developing a site that requires me to use 30 plugins. Yeah, some will say thats too many plugins for a site, no wonder i will get the white screen. But hey, this is Wordpress, one of the reason that makes Wordpress the most popular blogging platform is because the availability of the plugins that can make you achieve your goal in less time. For those who expert in php+wp development, you guys can say hack the wp is better than using a lot of plugins like what i am doing but hey, majority of wp users are not php guru. Most of them are normal user like me or even just know how to install and use what are available to them.
So far, here the common steps we do when get the white screen of death (WSOD).
Rename the wp-content/plugins folder name such as wp-content/plugins-temp, this will deactivate all plugins
Like me, i prefer rename the individual plugin folder name, such as wp-content/plugins/akismet to wp-content/plugins/akismet-temp
After that, reactivate all the plugins one by one, so we can know which plugin is the culprit
Check for extra empty space at the end of the plugin file, especially after the php closing tag ?> make sure there is no extra space after the tag. Make sure check at the theme functions.php file (if any) or the plugin file.
Increase the memory allocation for wordpress
Usually, your site will be back to normal after that. BUT this will still not solve this problem.
For me, this is very annoying to me, especially the step number 3. How can we know which plugin is the culprit?? At the first place, i thought the step number 3 is really a fact but now i think its a lie. WHY?
Like right now, suddenly after i activate 25 plugins, one of plugin that i cannot reactivate is Akismet. What? Akismet? Yes, the plugin dev by the WP team itself. I know the step number 3 above is a lie because if i activate Akismet first, the Akismet is activated successfully. No problem at all.
So right now the problem is plugins compatibility among the plugins. How can me as a normal user can identify which plugin that is not friendly to what plugin??? If i am using 30 plugins, how many probabilities from one plugin is not compatible to each plugin???? how can i know which plugins should be activated first so the WSOD will not appear?
If there is error, then maybe i can have a clue, but its a plain white screen. I am clueless. This clash of plugins in wordpress is really an unsolved problem that makes me really stress.
Anyone know how to fix this? At least know how to activate the plugins via mysql?

Answer 1

Hello :) this my first answer I hope it benefits so many people because I suffered from this stupid problem and the solution was really awkward and I can not get it but it works.
I'm here to talk about the solution for the white screen of death that comes after logging in and you get this white thing instead of the admin panel what ever the user role was.
There is the common solutions as mentioned above. In my case I had only one plugin and I did a lot of changes on it. Also I edited the footer.php in wordpress. I found out the WSOD ( White Screen Of Death ) comes out after the first changes in one of the php files of the plugin. The way I used to do the changes is by editing the php file in my computer through text editor then I would upload the changed php through ftp to replace the old one and then the problem starts. Abd when I revert the step and return the original file every thing goes back to normal.
If you having this problem the solution would be very simple and I really don't know why no one have ever post it before.
The solution would be by simply putting your changes through the editor you have in the admin panel. There is two editors, one for the theme and the other one for the plugins.
Open the editor in the admin panel for the plugin you want to modify insert the changes that you want in the text editor you have in the admin panel web page and when you are done click on the update file button.
And happily you will end up with your modification and NO White Screen Of Death.
I hope you all a bright future with no more WSOD.
UPDATE: through researching and trying more , I found out that editing the files and Encoding it with UTF-8 will lead to the problem to avoide that edit the file and make sure the encoding is either ANSI or UTF-8 without BOM

Answer 2

You should try to run a version of PHP with xdebug installed. A WSOD, that's most likely a PHP parse error. So this isn't really a WordPress problem, it's a PHP problem.
Using xdebug helps, because you'll get a fancy stacktrace in some significant % of the cases where you otherwise would have gotten a WSOD.