blank /wp-admin/index.php after upgrade from 4.5.x, missing Save Settings (button) in Settings > General

[scaturan]

Platform:

Apache/2.4.23 (FreeBSD)
PHP/5.6.25
mySQL 5.5.51

Like all my WordPress installations over the years, my codebase is unmodified with no plugins present or active. I don't use 3rd party plugins either, just whatever stock theme comes with latest.zip

Also, I perform upgrades manually.

--

Shortly after upgrading from 4.5.x (fresh install, just copied over previous .htaccess and wp-config.php files) - /wp-admin/index.php renders blank. I can login just fine (but get redirected to a blank page), and can also access /wp-admin/edit.php to modify posts or pages without any issues.

a 200 HTTP status code is sent by Apache when I open /wp-admin/index.php

Also, Settings > General > Save Settings (button) is not visible unless language-related code is removed. The same button is visible in all other areas like Writing, Discussion, etc..

On a fresh install of 4.5, I don't see this particular issue, so clearly, there's a code change somewhere.

Please advise, thank you.

Steve

[dd32]

Hi @scaturan and welcome back to Trac.

A blank render of the page, and output halting at the language sections, suggests that you may be hitting a PHP Fatal error during the page load for some reason, or perhaps a permissions error which is being hidden by PHP.

Can you check your PHP error logs for any fatal errors, and/or attempt defining ​`WP_DEBUG` to see if that'll allow for the error messages to be shown?

[scaturan]

I did those two things already (change to php.ini error_reporting options & setting WP_Debug to "true" - but no error messages are being shown.

the Source with /wp-admin/options-general.php is blank after this line.

"<option value='6' >Saturday</option></select></td>
</tr>"

the Source for /wp-admin/index.php is always empty.

Any other options I can explore?

Please advise, thank you!

[dd32]

Unfortunately nothing I can suggest, you'll need to figure out where and why PHP is failing by triple checking your logs. You may wish to attempt to re-apply all the WordPress files to ensure your issue isn't from a partial upgrade (But that should be obvious from PHP logs indicating the fatal error).

If you're using suhosin you may wish to disable that and/or check it's log files, but without further detail here there's nothing we can go on, and nothing to suggest it's a bug within WordPress (which is in use by many millions of others already without similar reports).

Trac is not for support, instead we have the ​Support Forums for helping diagnose site problems.
I'm marking this as invalid, pending information which can be used to actually pinpoint a bug - at which time we can re-open it.

[scaturan]

Actually, I had no resolution from the Support Forums for more than 1 week, so I had resorted here. Will keep looking for clues as to why the behavior exists.

[scaturan]

alright, looks like I found something:

after removing this line from /wp-admin/options-general.php - the Save Settings button finally appears:
$translations = wp_get_available_translations();

after removing this line from /wp-admin/index.php - Dashboard no longer renders a blank page:
wp_dashboard_setup();

I tested this on a fresh install of 4.6 and another site upgraded from 4.5.x

[scaturan]

Looks like I'm not the only one anymore.

​https://wordpress.org/support/topic/blank-wp-adminindexphp/#post-8200490

This is clearly a bug since more than one person is able to reproduce it. Although not a high priority, removal of the two very specific lines points to something that needs to be addressed.

[ocean90]

#38153 was marked as a duplicate.

[ocean90]

Does someone have a test site with a clean install where the same error exists? I'd like to have a look, please DM me ("ocean90") on ​Slack.

[scaturan]

@ocean90
thank you for considering to look into this issue. I left you a DM on Slack yesterday with all the site/login details. Thank you once more!

[mikeatdatafault]

Apparantly its a compatability issue that is resolved in the latest version of PHP (5.6.26) if that helps any

[uheber]

Hello together,

I have the same problem as described by scaturan. Installed a fresh WordPress 4.6.1 DE including new database.

Request to /wp-admin/index.php is displayed as blank page. But when I remove the function call wp_dashboard_setup(); (/wp-admin/includes/dashboard.php) then admin content is rendered.

So the problem can be reproduced.

I am using WordPress on FreeBSD 10 with NGinX v1.10.1 and PHP-FPM v5.6.24.

No errors in nginx logs available, WordpressP/PHP debug mode active.

Will try to use the latest PHP version (5.6.27) and let you know, if it helps.

[scaturan]

the problem still exist on WordPress 4.7-RC1 both under PHP 5.6 and 7.0.13 -- the remedy is the same as I noted earlier.

I also noticed that opening /wp-admin/update-core.php renders a blank page alongside a 500 Internal Server Error response status, but after a browser REFRESH, a 200 response status is sent and the page renders correctly.

[desrosj]

@mikeatdatafault @ocean90 do you recall what the compatibility issue was that resolved this issue, or if there were any more specifics discovered? I have tried, but I am unable to reproduce this issue.

Going to mark this as a close candidate as there are no specific details to reproduce, what the error message actually was, or any new reports.

[ocean90]

No, but I guess it was OPcache related.