Fixing the infamous White Screen of Death on Site Migration

[sjg]

So, for long and uninteresting reasons, I needed to move a working CMSMS site from a PHP 4 host to a WAMP-based PHP 5 host.

I've done similar migrations at least fifty times, without problems.

Today, with too little coffee in my bloodstream, I made a few omissions, and ran into problems. Partially due to under-caffeination,  I found these problems very difficult to diagnose, so I thought I'd post this to help anyone in the same boat.

I got the dreaded White Screen of Death. Nothing useful in the PHP logs (even though I had errors set to E_ALL | E_NOTICE).

There ended up being two problems:

* Database permissions. I didn't correctly grant the user access permissions on the new database.
* Directory permissions. I had given correct directory permissions on CMS_ROOT/tmp/cache and CMS_ROOT/tmp/templates_c, but had failed to give the correct permissions on the contentcache.php

The combination of the problems apparently prevented any useful diagnostic messages.

So, the moral of the story:
even if you know exactly what you're doing, it pays to follow the proper steps one by one, and make sure you're not skipping any.

Good Luck,
___Samuel___

[tyman00]

Thanks for posting. It's nice to know that even the experienced guys still make mistakes .

We'll let the excuse of too much blood in the Coffee-Stream slide just this once