Where did my admin screen go?

This post is just a quick note to log a problem and its solution. It only took a wee bit of googling but might help me or someone else at a later date. It only applies to self hosted WordPress blogs.

This evening I tried to log on to my blog only to be met with a blank screen. I tried my DS106 blog and that was fine so it didn’t look like the first google suggestion about php being out of memory. Next suggestion was .htaccess corruptions, so I opened fetch and had a look at the file, looked pretty much the same as I recall (note, keep better backups).

The third google suggestion pointed to plugins and suggested solutions 1. This is what I did:

Using using my ftp application (cyberduck) I edited the wp-config.php file. Changing:

define('WP_DEBUG', false); to true

Trying to load the page showed an error mentioning the medium plugin that had been updated earlier in the day. So I changed the name of the plugin folder (still in cyberduck) to medium-broken. This allowed me to log in. Checking the plugin page showed that there was another update for the plugin, crossing my fingers I updated and all was well, the renamed folder was removed and a new folder was in place.

How to Fix the WordPress White Screen of Death ↩