Upgrade to WordPress 3.3.1

April 1st, 2012

Another nightmare upgrading WordPress to the latest 3.3.1. I wouldn’t do it, except that I’m afraid of leaving a backdoor since this site was hacked due to an older version of WordPress.

After the upgrade, I could no longer access the Admin screen. When I logged in, I just saw a blank white screen. This is known in the WordPress world as the ‘blank screen of death’.

My solution ended up being to disable all plugins. Many sites suggested to check the wp_config file to remove whitespaces. Yes, this sounds strange, but apparently its been a long standing problem in WordPress. This was not my problem.
http://www.colinmcnulty.com/blog/2008/07/08/solution-to-wordpress-blank-screen-of-death/

To disable plug-ins, you will need to follow the information in this link:
http://perishablepress.com/quickly-disable-or-enable-all-wordpress-plugins-via-the-database/
You need phpMyAdmin access to your MySQL database tables and run the following line of SQL:
UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = ‘a:0:{}’ WHERE option_name = ‘active_plugins’;

This solved the problem. The whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth for WordPress… again.

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