White screen of death in Wordpress on IIS

[jeff.yates]

When installing 4.5.0 (also tried with 4.4.7) of CiviCRM into Wordpress on an IIS system, the CiviCRM admin screen is blank. We tracked this issue down to Smarty and open_basedir, which is not defined in PHP when installed on IIS.

We worked around this by adding ini_set('open_basedir', ABSPATH); to wp_config.php before the last line that adds wp_settings.php.

I have raised an issue (CRM-15340) to get a more appropriate fix made for future releases but wanted to share this here to save others the time we spent tracking this down.

[Dan C]

It seems to me that this is a server settings issue, not a code issue so I'm not sure this is an issue to be fixed within Civi.  Could someone on the core team comment?  I have no problem looking into this if it is something we want to pursue.