Martin Paling » wordpress

Wordpress and the Blank Screen of Death

Martin — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 08:21:22 +0000

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:

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:

Image grab of comments from healthy config file

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

Image grab of comments from nasty file

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!

Premium Wordpress Themes and Laziness

Martin — Fri, 22 May 2009 23:55:17 +0000

I admit it I was far to lazy do create my own wordpress theme for this site, I seem to have spent the last 2 months working on code, wordpress themes and web site designs… the truth is I’d much rather be doing something else. So the prospect of designing and coding my own wordpress theme was just one step too far. I’d never bought a premium wordpress theme before and hadn’t really intended on doing so. What I needed for my site was something that dealt with video embedding nicely I first looked at the free Videographer theme by Zoomstart. It worked fairly well, but perhaps wasn’t pretty enough and would have required a bit of extra work. My hunt around the web and the wordpress theme repositories didn’t pull up anything useful or even that useable for my needs.

Then I happened across the Tubular theme by Brian Gardner and available from Studiopress. Video embedding is dealt with very well, and it’s attractive out of the box, the code is nicely laid out and the css is easy to edit – all in all it’s a very nice package and as you would expect (you hope) from a premium wordpress theme there’s good support available in the support forums.

I know some people would reel at the thought of paying for a premium theme when there are so many good free themes out there… but I’m just happy to have something that works and if that means spending a little money so be it.

From Gallery2 to Wordpress

Martin — Wed, 20 May 2009 22:20:27 +0000

After over a year using Gallery2 to display my audio recordings i’ve decided to give it the axe. Part of my decision was the need to move the audio files off of my hosting account and save myself some bandwidth but also because I’ve grown a little unhappy with Gallery2. Ultimately it is designed as an image gallery - but even so I’ve found it to be a complicated, over designed resources hog. Gallery3 is currently in development and maybe that will be better. But I don’t think it’s an environment that’s going to work displaying audio recordings. Also I can’t help but think that a Wordpress installation with the right plugins can produce something just as effective as Gallery2 and possibly even Gallery3.

DSA Media made us a great gallery/album system for Scenography – The Theatre Design Website, it’s simplicity is genius compared to a Gallery2 installation it’s a real dream and so easy to maintain and use.

I’ve now converted my audio files to movie files and hosted them on Vimeo. They’re all in here and you may browse through them using the categories link on the right.

More about using Vimeo later!