[solved] Wordpress Blank Page on Install

Question

I could use a little help installing wordpress on my home machine. I did my best to follow the instructions given on the wiki page, including using phpMyAdmin. I was able to get everything to work right up until after saving the provided text into wp-config.php. After clicking the button to "Run the Install", I am greeted not by a "Success!", but by simply a blank, white page. I've found lots of questions about this exact issue, but every solution is different and not fixing the problem: one said the memory allocation default of ~4MB in php.ini is too small--the setting in my file was already 128MB, not 4MB. Another suggested I didn't have a complete set of the files--well, I wouldn't expect that to be the case for a vanilla install using pacman, at least without a note in the wiki saying, "You need this file and you don't already have it!!"
Would anyone with some experience be willing to help me troubleshoot this? I'm foraging into a new field I have little experience in; I was able to get dokuwiki to work, for example, but I've never done anything beyond that. This issue is especially frustrating because all I get is a blank screen; no messages, no logs... how am I supposed to track down the problem, especially when I'm finding so many different problems that have this exact same symptom?
A couple of things to note: I would like to install the actual wordpress files into /srv/http/wordpress instead of using the default /usr/share/webapps/wordpress. (Probably in its own partition in the end, but right now I'll settle for just getting it to work.) I suspect that, like I found out in my dokuwiki experimenting, I should just copy the contents of the installation directory to where I want to use it and ensure that the httpd-wordpress.conf file points to the appropriate place. (Which, by the way, is never explained in the wiki for either wordpress or dokuwiki; I think it probably ought to be.) Even so, I have tried to get it working using the default directory, and it has the exact same result. I don't believe it's a permissions problem, because I have tried setting the directory ownership to my user and still have no change.
I did follow the instructions while configuring phpMyAdmin under Enabling Configuration Storage (optional).
Last edited by DrMag (2014-02-27 17:08:34)

Answer 1

DrMag wrote:Well, I did manage to solve the problem, and it was indeed the wp-config.php file. I had forgotten that when I paste into vim, it automatically adds comment characters on returns, so it ended up commenting the entire file.
I'm glad you were able to find the problem! Yeah, gotta watch out for Vim. What a crappy editor.
I do think it's interesting that you chose to do a raw install; if you ever need to uninstall, is there any issue, or simply a matter of removing the whole directory? I suspect that what I have done has the same effect; by copying the /usr/share/webapps/wordpress/ directory I've essentially installed it to a separate location, and everything is run from there. We'll have to see.. I'm still trying to learn how to build a webpage, let alone a wordpress theme.
"Installation" of WordPress is simply unpackaging a tar file. Yes, uninstallation would be done by deleting the one WordPress directory. Yes, you created your own local installation by copying the files that pacman installed. You can uninstall the "wordpress" package and it will (of course) have no effect on your WordPress site.
I have the permissions configured a little differently than how pacman sets things up. I think pacman installs all of the files and directories as owned by "root" whereas I have them owned by the "http" user (which is the user that my Apache server runs as). That's what allows the WordPress software to update itself and install it's own themes.
After getting WordPress installed, running my own blog has been dead simple. I just login to it as if it were any old blog on wordpress.com.
Good luck with your site!