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I've been doing some work with Wordpress off and on for the last couple of weeks - migrating a site that uses a custom CMS onto a Wordpress installation - and a couple of times I've run into the following vexing problem when setting up a local Wordpress installation for testing. I couldn't find anything about it on the web, and it took me several hours to debug, so here's a writeup in case someone else has the same problem.
Steps to reproduce: install Wordpress 3.0.5 (as provided by Ubuntu). Using the command-line mysql client, load in a database dump from a Wordpress 3.3.1 site. Visit http://localhost/wordpress (or wherever you've got it installed).
Symptoms: instead of your deathless prose, you see an entirely blank browser window. HTTP headers are sent correctly, but no page content is produced. However, http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin is displayed correctly, and all your content is in the database.
What's actually going on: Wordpress has decided that the TwentyTen theme is broken, so it's reverting to the default theme. It is hence looking for a theme called "Wordpress Default". But the default theme is actually just called "Default". So it doesn't find a theme, and, since display is handled by the theme files, nothing gets displayed.
How to fix it: go into the admin interface, and select Appearance->Themes. Change the theme to "Default". Your blog is now visible again!
If you wish, you can now change the theme back to TwentyTen: it turns out that it's not actually broken at all.
Thanks to Konstantin Kovshenin for suggesting I turn WP_DEBUG to true in wp-config.php. This allowed me to eventually track down the problem (though, annoyingly, the "theme not found" error was only displayed on the admin page, so I didn't see it for a while).
Next question: this is clearly a bug, but it's a bug in a superseded version. Where should I report it?
Edit: on further thought, I think this may be more to do with the site whose dump I was loading in using a theme that I don't have installed. In which case, the bug may well affect the latest version of Wordpress. But I haven't yet proved this to my satisfaction.
Steps to reproduce: install Wordpress 3.0.5 (as provided by Ubuntu). Using the command-line mysql client, load in a database dump from a Wordpress 3.3.1 site. Visit http://localhost/wordpress (or wherever you've got it installed).
Symptoms: instead of your deathless prose, you see an entirely blank browser window. HTTP headers are sent correctly, but no page content is produced. However, http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin is displayed correctly, and all your content is in the database.
What's actually going on: Wordpress has decided that the TwentyTen theme is broken, so it's reverting to the default theme. It is hence looking for a theme called "Wordpress Default". But the default theme is actually just called "Default". So it doesn't find a theme, and, since display is handled by the theme files, nothing gets displayed.
How to fix it: go into the admin interface, and select Appearance->Themes. Change the theme to "Default". Your blog is now visible again!
If you wish, you can now change the theme back to TwentyTen: it turns out that it's not actually broken at all.
Thanks to Konstantin Kovshenin for suggesting I turn WP_DEBUG to true in wp-config.php. This allowed me to eventually track down the problem (though, annoyingly, the "theme not found" error was only displayed on the admin page, so I didn't see it for a while).
Next question: this is clearly a bug, but it's a bug in a superseded version. Where should I report it?
Edit: on further thought, I think this may be more to do with the site whose dump I was loading in using a theme that I don't have installed. In which case, the bug may well affect the latest version of Wordpress. But I haven't yet proved this to my satisfaction.
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