The most common cause of a blank screen at any stage in the process, if your source view shows empty, is that PHP aborted during its run without dumping buffers.  During software upgrades, this is usually due to one of three reasons:

1. An incomplete transfer of the requisite files.  Don’t insist that you’re certain that didn’t happen, even if it’s from a command like svn or cp that shouldn’t fail; you’re not certain until you’ve checked.
2. PHP has run out of some resource, typically RAM.
3. mod_security is set up brokenly

[digg-reddit-me]In both cases, you can figure out which by checking your apache logs.  On windows, go to the Windows Event Viewer.  On unix, this may live in a variety of places; most common is shared hosting by cpanel/plesk, where you can get it in your control panel, or to just look in /var/logs/ .

If it’s #1, you’re likely to see something like this in logs (this is from my site, which just suffered this problem and was quickly fixed) :

[Tue Jul 15 18:45:28 2008] [error] [client 24.117...]
PHP Fatal error:  Call to undefined function
force_ssl_admin() in /var/www/html/wp-settings.php on
line 390, referer: http://.../wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=55

Don’t worry if that undefined function has a different name or a different referrer, or whatever; that’s how you track down missing code, and missing code means some file didn’t get updated.

I’ve been thinking about making an image plugin for WordPress.  I want to restart my image of the day process, but the import process has been dreadful, and there’s no programmatic access to the image list, meaning things like random images and images from subgroups aren’t particularly reasonable.  To that end I need to write my own, and since I’d love the rank that comes from having a high-usage plugin, I need a clear idea of what things go into an image plugin, what features are missing from existing plugins, et cetera.

I’m already doing complex efficient randomization, API access, bulk posting, timed bulk posting, base autotagging, auto-categorization, a catalog widget, and I’m going to make sure that my stuff is compatible with the All In One SEO pack.  I’m going to provide integration points, and I’m going to provide an example integration with LightBox, or one of its relatives.  I’m going to provide voting, moderated tag suggestion and home-post permalinking.

I’ll also be writing strict, browser/version portable code without hacks.  Yay!

Please let me know what you’d want to see if there were a new image plugin coming out.

Testing Viper007Bond’s video plugin begins here:

[youtube]OTEqR4zv4C0[/youtube]

Well, I had something of a pleasant surprise, just now. Two Word Press plugins which weren’t expected to work together in fact do quite nicely. I now have inline per-article polling.

[?php jal_democracy(3); ?]

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Right. That video I mentioned that Mark from #wordpress gave me, on how to make a plugin.

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Man. So I went into the Word Press IRC channel today, thinking I was gonna ask some questions. One of the regulars, Mark, gave me some pretty useful information, including a little video he’d made of installing a plugin stub. Needless to say, Uncle Fatty got excited, and decided he wanted to write a plugin and donate to the community, right?

Not so fast.

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