CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

ok I was stuck on the wsod... how I got here is a sad and sorry (and separate story)... I also had nothing visible in log files... so was very stuck

anyway after bruising my forehead for some time I just stuck

ini_set('display_errors','On');

in my civicrm.settings.php file and got a meaningful error message... I'm still in the woods but at least now I have a compass!

this may not be best practice but I found in my searches quite a few wsod posts with silent logs (none reflected my particular problem) so this tip could help others... hope it does!

There should always be an error recorded in the server error logs, whether or not PHP reports it on the screen.

I'm having a similar problem -- updated drupal to 6.22 and reloaded CiviCRM 3.4 and all I get when I try to get into any of the CiviCRM pages I get the WSOD. I suspect that it is a problem with the templates. I can find no templates_c directory under ../sites/all/files/civicrm. Someone suggested "In my case I did rm -rf sites/example.com/files/civicrm/templates_c/* and that got rid of the WSOD." I'm to bloody ignorant to know how to "do" this.  Does this mean create a ...templates_c directory? And I assume I have to make it writable by the server? Thanks for any help.

Thanks for the advice. I did find the templates_c directory eventually.

I'd appreciate it if someone could tell me what Arielgold meant by "In my case I did rm -rf sites/example.com/files/civicrm/templates_c/* and that got rid of the WSOD". I'm not real strong in Linux (or any CLI) so I don't understand what she "did".
.....OK, stoopid me, I did look up rm and -rf and I think this means remove all the files in the stated directory (and their little dogs, too). I guess I will try that, maybe on a test site first. As I understand it, CiviCRM generates all those templates, so maybe when I installed the new CiviCRM without removing the old templates, it created new/additional ones and now is too confused to display anything.

I'm now working on the theory that maybe what I have been upgrading is an overlay on an essentially empty database. So that when I do a backup and restore, I am just restoring a data base without data. CiviCRM can find the page because the filename is there, but there is no content, so I get a WSOD instead of an error message. Does this make sense? I'm going to take a mental health break and then switch back to the Linux machine I was using earlier and see if I can find a backup that is actually populated. None of the backups saved to the Windows machine I am still using seem to have anything in them. Failing that, I will go back to my long-suffering ISP and see if he can do a restore from, say, three months ago.
Thanks for any advice, past and future.

@rflemin,

You said ...

I'd appreciate it if someone could tell me what Arielgold meant by "In my case I did rm -rf sites/example.com/files/civicrm/templates_c/* and that got rid of the WSOD". I'm not real strong in Linux (or any CLI) so I don't understand what she "did".

I see you worked out "rm -rf" but did you understand "example.com" in the path? Despite what an earlier respondent claimed, the "template_c" directory is not placed under "sites/all" which contains resources available to all the sites this instance of Drupal manages. It's placed under "sites/default" by default, which contains resources available to the default site.  It's placed under "sites/example.com" if CiviCRM is associated with "example.com".

Ken