I was editing a theme and then my Wordpress pages went blank. The WP-Admin page is only a blank page. I can’t access the Worpress backend. I can’t login to my Wordpress site. Did I corrupt my theme? Did I delete my Wordpress site? How do I get my Wordpress site back? Did I screw up my Wordpress database? This has happened before to someone else, right?

Well, it has happened to someone else. It is a bit scary at first … but, don’t worry. It is fairly easy to get your pages back. You don’t even have to mess with phpMyAdmin or mySQL. Here is what you do.

If you are using Dreamweaver, or other similar IDE, you can open your site and look at the files on your remote server. If you have access to your remote server from a web control panel, or otherwise, the same solution will work. Locate the theme that you were working on when the pages went blank and you lost access to the Wordpress backend and login page. If you don’t have a copy of the remote files on your local machine, you may want to download the theme files as a backup. Most likely you already have the copy you uploaded to your site. Then, you can try deleting the functions.php page for the theme. That could very well give you back your Wordpress site. It won’t fix the theme you were using, but you can switch to a different theme while you figure out what is wrong. If deleting the functions.php file does not do the trick, then simply delete the entire theme from your remote server. You can find the theme in wp-content->themes->theme-that-caused-the-problem.

I stumbled upon this problem myself when I was trying to create a theme that obviously had a problem in my code somewhere. Removing the functions.php file was all that was necessary for me to be able to access my WP backend and change the theme; as an interim fix, while I attempted to locate the problem in my code.

I hope this helps someone else save some time and worry.

If you found this helpful, let me know.

Joomla, Drupal or Wordpress …

There seems to be a lot of debate and controversy over which one to use. All have been referred to as content management systems [CMS]. However, Wordpress really is not so much a content management system as it is a blogging solution. I have setup Wordpress sites and redesigned Wordpress themes, been involved in Drupal site development, and have designed and developed in the Joomla environment. There are as many opinions about which one to use as there are people putting in their two cents worth.

In short, if you are an end user looking for a great application for blogging, I believe the best possible option is to set up a Wordpress site. Drupal and Joomla can be used for blogging, but that is not what they are designed for. Plus, Wordpress sites are the easiest of the three to setup. There are a myriad of pre-designed themes to choose from; and a multitude of plugins designed to extend Wordpress functionality. In fact, you can even set up ecommerce or shopping cart solutions on Wordpress sites.

Now, if you are a large corporation, with multiple websites to deploy; are concerned primarily with functionality and hierarchy and not overly concerned with aesthetics, then Drupal may be your solution. However, if you are not equipped with extensive programming knowledge or have a budget for this type of development, then think twice about Drupal. The learning curve for Drupal is fairly steep. Do not opt for Drupal if you need to have a site set up and running smoothly in a short period of time. Drupal is the solution that developers would most likely promote, because you will be needing to employ their services to maintain a Drupal site.

For communities and for article or content servers, think about using Joomla. It does have a much steeper learning curve than Wordpress, but not quite as difficult as Drupal. If you want a site that is aesthetically pleasing and have an intermediate level of PHP background, then Joomla could be a great option. There are a myriad of templates, components, modules and plugins available for Joomla, too. Bear in mind that anyone can create these extensions and make them available. However, that does not mean they all work, or are all free. Some cost and some are free. Some work better than others. Some extensions may not have any documentation in a language you can read and write. However, just like Drupal and Wordpress, there are forums where help is sometimes available.

If you are thinking of deploying a new website and not quite sure which makes most sense, talk to someone with experience with each of the three most popular blogging and content management systems.

Where is the debugger or host application running?

• Localhost
• Other Machine

Enter IP Address: _________________________

Are you experiencing this pop up every time you open a website that has a Flash banner, or Flash movie of some type playing? Surely, you have tried to click on Localhost … only to see the popup reappear again. You can enter an IP address in the text input box, but the popup still reappears again. Then after a couple attempts and you select to not connect or ignore, the popup goes away … until the next page you open with another Flash movie playing.

So, why is this happening? It could be a couple reasons. You may not have downloaded and successfully installed the Adobe Flash Player 9, or it may have been a corrupt install. I have Firefox, IE, Chrome and Safari browsers installed and dealt with this perplexing and persistent problem until I went back to the Adobe site and downloaded and installed the browser-specific Adobe Flash Player 9 plugins.

The Plugin that addresses IE browsers and Active X can be downloaded here.

For Firefox and the Netscape/Mozilla flavored browsers you can download the Plugin here.

Not long back I wrote a couple posts about SPAM and then started getting more SPAM. I did not have the Askiment plug in installed at that time. The reason I had not installed the plug in was because I did not have a Wordpress API key. I would have already given the Askimet plug in a try, except when I had gone to their site I thought it was only for Wordpress sites that were hosted by Wordpress.com.

I contacted the people at Askimet and found out that all I needed to do was setup an account at Wordpress.com in order to get the API key. It was not required that my Wordpress blog be hosted there, only that I opened a user account. How easy was that? Very easy. Since, I installed the Askimet plug in I have not received any more spam because the plug in works. It has blocked all of them so far.

So if you have a Wordpress blog that is self hosted and you are receiving spam, or want to insure that you do not get a bunch of spam posts, then hopefully the clarification in this post will allow you to get the protection now, rather than thinking it was not available to you.

Happy blogging