Blog Azeroth

My entire blog (http://www.mamadruid.com/index.php), including the admin panel, are showing up as blank white pages and with no source code to view.

Yesterday afternoon I activated a new theme. I created a post under the new theme and received comments with it. About 4-5 hours later is when the blank white pages appeared.

What I CAN do:

Access the blog files via my server's cPanel interface.

I uploaded an html page, via cPanel, which is working. (http://www.mamadruid.com/index.html)

Publish a post from Windows Live Writer

Access my sandbox environment (http://www.mamadruid.com/sandbox). It's a 2nd WP install under the same domain, so it's definitely an issue exclusive to my root directory WP install.

What I CAN'T do:

Access my admin panel.

Connect via FTP. I get the error, "cannot open remote folder public_html/. Access Denied. The file may not exist, or there could be a permission problem."

What I have tried:

Following the information I found here did not turn up anything. All expected plugins were listed.

I deleted the install.php file from my wp-admin folder.

I deleted all my plugins.

I deleted all the theme folders but Default.

I am at a complete loss as to what to do. I have a July 31 backup, but I don't want to lose the data between then and now.

Feel free to email me any suggestions or helpful links to mamadruid at gmail dot com.

Thanks!

I would say the first thing that I would do in your position is contact your hosting company and see if they can do a restore of the site (in theory, they should have a back-up of the site from a day or two ago, and you can revert to an "older" version that was working fine), or see if they can check their logs for any odd errors.

Failing that, they should at least have a back-up (or, you may even have one) of your WP database. In which case, you could do a fresh install of WP and just import your saved database information, which should fix the problem.

Those are my suggestions, anyway. I'll poke around and see if I find anything else.

Thanks Lassirra!

I did end up restoring a backup of the database, which didn't seem to work. It was only after updating my version of WordPress through cPanel that seemed to work.

Although I'm pretty sure I had updated it - just not via cPanel.

Anyhow, my site was working again for awhile. I reinstalled the most current version of the Mandigo them and reuploaded a few of the plugins I had been using. Once again, I created a post, received comments and a few hours later it disappears again.

It's just really bizarre!

That's..... really weird. I'm rather at a loss, though I suspect it'll be the type of situation where you look at certain pieces of the problem for hours on end, and then go "Oh, duh." when something glaringly obvious ends up fixing it. (I have those moments a lot.)

My best guess would be that it's a compatibility issue with one of your plugins. Try disabling them all, then re-enabling them one at a time as you continue to post to see which one may be causing the problem, would be my next suggestion. (At this point, it really seems like you're down to "guess and check", unless someone else has a clue--I definitely don't.)

The sudden issue with connecting to your FTP server makes me wonder if this isn't at least partially hosting related. Have you contacted them to see if they can straighten that out, at least?

Also, depending on where you host, they may provide access to your SQL database(s) through your control panel (not the WordPress admin) so you could do a more recent backup of your database so that hopefully you won't lose anything.

Are you using the WP-Cache addon? If so, your site may have appeared to work fine for a while because that addon can prevent changes you've made from appearing right away (although a new theme should have triggered a clearing of the cache). You can generally test out new changes by visiting a page you haven't visited recently or by building an exception into its configuration. (For instance, if you add "refresh=true" to its exception list, visiting www.mamadruid.com/index.php?refresh=true should make that page NOT load from cache).

Sorry to hear of your troubles.

It seems to be working just fine now.

I ended up removing the entire WP install, reinstalled WP and imported my backup.

The FTP issue ended up being a non-issue. What was happening there was each time my blog "disappeared," my FTP login info would be cleared from my site setting in Dreamweaver.

Thanks for the suggestions, best guesses, and sympathy!