Last night I migrated my websites to a VPS server on pair.com  and one of my websites ended up showing the dreaded WordPress White Screen Of Death (WSOD).

I was using the latest version of W3 Total Cache (0.9.2.4) and CloudFlare on the website, and was not sure why I got the WSOD. I was able to view html and php files on the same website fine, but WordPress files just showed the white screen of death on the front end of the website.

Both the domain name which goes through the CloudFlare system as well as my dedicated IP address for the website which by-passes the CloudFlare system, showed both the WSOD, so I could rule out CloudFlare.

The Admin backend was still functional, so I went and cleared the W3TC cache, but nothing changed, still a white homepage. I then started by disabling plugins in WordPress to see what could cause the WSOD.

As soon as I deactivated W3 Total Cache I got a “Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING in /……./wp-config.php on line 17“.

I looked in the wp-config.php and on line 17 was the define(‘DB_NAME’, ”); code. everything looked fine, but it still was giving me the error.

After examining an older copy of the wp-config.php, I could see that W3 Total Cache removed it’s own code from the wp-config.sys and pushed the default comment field right into the <?php syntax.

By moving the start of the comment to a new line solved the parse error.

<?php/**
to
<?php
/**

After fixing the parse error and having CloudFlare in Development Mode as well trying my direct IP address to the website, I was able to see that the site loaded again and no issue with WSOD.

I am not sure why W3TC gave me the WSOD, but after uninstalling it and re-installing it and then removing some of the options that I had on my previous settings, it now seems to work.  I am still investigating which setting that caused WordPress to display the WSOD.

I also would like to mention that Pair.com support was also very helpful, checking my settings and helping me re-syncing the the new site with my old content when experiencing the issues.

SimpleViewer Flash viewer

The solution for the problem was to create a small php script that would pull the images and caption from the gallery.xml file that SimpleViewer uses and then display them on the webpage for the spiders and non-flash viewers to see.

This code if for websites that are not running on a CMS system.  You should be able to edit your pages directly for this script to work.

There are several different ways of displaying the images, but I put the PHP include command into the flashcontent DIV which you can see below.

<div id=”flashcontent”>Your browser requires JavaScript and the Flash Player to view the content on this site.
<a href=”http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer/”>Get Flash.</a>
<?php include(“simpleviewer-seo.php”); ?>
</div>

The code will fetch your thumbnails and captions.

You will have to change the $imgpath variable to your gallery directory.

The code also puts the first 50 characters of your caption into the image’s ALT and Title tag.

To see if the plugin is working, enter the url simpleviewer-seo.php file in your browser and you can see what it put’s out.  Another way is to disable javascript in the browser and you should then see the script running rather than the SimpleViewer flash gallery.

If you need any help, feel free to send me an email.

Gallery output for non-flash browsers and spiders.

Mikael Kjellstrom

You can download the code below and try it out.

http://www.mkwebdesign.ca/codes/simpleviewer-seo.zip

This code is provided without guarantee and  ’AS IS’ .

Note: SimpleViewer SEO does not work with the WordPress Plugin of SimpleViewer. I might support a modified plugin in the future for WordPress, so if you are interested, please leave a comment.

The plugin is available as a public beta. To read more about the plugin (including a download link), click here.