Wordpress and the Blank Screen of Death

I experienced my first blank screen of death in Wordpress about two months ago (not bad going considering the amount of wordpress sites I edit/administer.) when I was working on an install of WPMU, the developer I was working with figured out the issue really quickly. An empty line before or after the opening or closing php declerations:

<?php Code Here  ?>

And the answer was to try the following:

• Uninstall all plugins (No Joy!)
• Revert to default theme (No joy)
• Upload fresh theme (Implication being you haven’t messed with it – no joy)

When none of that worked the only solution was to trawl through all of our files until we found one with an empty line – fortunately the search started and stopped with the config file which we’d recently edited.

Then a few weeks later and yet again it was my config file and this time a google search showed I wasn’t alone in having this issue.

Once I could put down to bad editing, but twice seemed a bit much. I figured it must be my editor WebDesign by Rage Software, so I switched to Text Wrangler.

Then yesterday while installing a wordpress site for a friend I got the following php error during the installation: 

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/account/public_html/test-site/wp-config.php:153) in /home/account/public_html/test-site/wp-login.php on line 255

A quick Google later and yet again it seems that it’s an empty space in the config file, and yes i’ve used WebDesign again to edit it!

So I decide to compare the code (In Text Wrangler) from my affected file to that of a healthy one, and look what turns up:

That’s as you would expect, now look at what WebDesign did to it:

 

Empty spaces everywhere! Either it’s adding them by default or I’ve ticked an option somewhere. From now on i’ll just have to use Text Wrangler as default – which is no hardship, I just wish I could set the text to soft wrap as default – I seem to have to enable it everytime I load up!