turning on debug mode

Turn debug mode on

edit your wp-config.php file and find

define('WP_DEBUG', false);

change to

define('WP_DEBUG', true);


General causes of bugs

1. Dodgy plugins/templates. Remove them all and add them back one at a time. Same for themes
2. Config errors. Replace the config.php file with the template and reinstate it. Obviously copy/paste the login details for the database out before you do that, so when you recreate it, it asks for them again.
3. Code incompatibilities. You have some old code somewhere (e.g. an old php file) which was not upgraded and is now incompatible with the new php in the new issue of wordpress/plugin/template etc
4. Permission errors. 

chmod -R 755 /var/www/mysite
chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/mysite

assuming your installation is located in /var/www/mysite.

On a single-site server it will be /var/www/html

"There has been a critical error on your website" = problem 3 above, usually.

Popular posts from this blog

bash + python script to find wordpress malware and delete it.

OK so there are three parts to this script. 1. An exclude list 2. The script 3. A python script to check for randomness. The idea is it finds spammy-looking filenames and then runs a python entropy script to check if the file is random-ish internally. It then offers to delete. Note that real virii have an entropy in the 5.8 region, because they use code obfuscators. If the entropy is lower than that rather skip deleting and manually check the file. I know about wordfence-cli but I do not like it. Flags are -f for find and -d to delete. It prompts for each delete. 1. The script sudo mkdir -p /scripts/wordpress/ sudo vi /scripts/wordpress/find_spam_crap.sh #!/bin/bash export TERM='xterm-256color' # File containing known, safe PHP filenames to ignore IGNORE_FILE="/scripts/wordpress/find_spam_crap.ignore" # File containing all known filenames for exhaustive English exclusion EXCLUDE_FILE="/scripts/wordpress/find_spam_crap.exclude" # Function to load ignore list ...
Read more

enabling web interface updates over FTP or directly

Wordpress can be updated on the command line or the graphical side in the web browser. But in order to do that you need write permission on the server as the user www-data (the webs server), or, ftp access to upload files from wordpress.org to the server you are hosted at. Hence, you can either set the website to be owned by the webserver (and risk that vulnerabilities to the webserver affect your website), or you can enable FTP. The default is to let the webserver (www-data) have write permission: chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/wordpress/ chmod -R 775 /var/www/wordpress/ To enable FTP, create a user specifically for the purpose on the server's FTP service and give them ownership of the wordpress folder. Put the following code into the wp-config.php file define( 'FS_METHOD', 'direct' ); define( 'FTP_BASE', 'www.myserver.com/www/wordpress' ); define( 'FTP_CONTENT_DIR', ' www.myserver.com /www/wordpress/wp-content/' ); define( ...
Read more