In getting set up to start using bendustries.org, I found my child theme on bendustries.co was inactive. In trying to fix it, I broke my site entirely, leaving only a blank white page everywhere I went. Here’s how I fixed it.
Bendustries.co was the first site I’d had for a long, long time. Long enough ago that WordPress wasn’t around when I was last running any sites. Apparently, I took a very hack approach to customizing the Graphene theme I was using, as the child theme I had created wasn’t working, and yet the site was displaying exactly as I had set it up.
At any rate, in trying to fix the child theme, I broke my site entirely. The only page I could get to display was the readme.html in the root of the WordPress installation directory. Searching around the web, I found one page that looked like it might be able to help, http://www.velvetblues.com/web-development-blog/my-wordpress-blog-is-blank/. A lot of it seemed more involved than I thought should be necessary, but I downloaded all my WordPress files anyway, in case a full reinstall of WP should be needed.
Remembering back to a problem I’d run into with another WP site I manage, when a bad plugin broke WP, I wondered if rooting around in the MySQL tables where the WP data is stored might help. Using PHPMyAdmin, I navigated into the WP database and found the ‘wp-options’ table. In that table, there are ‘template’ and ‘stylesheet’ fields. In my case, the template was ‘graphene’, while the stylesheet was ‘graphene-child’.
Before I touched anything, I exported this table out of the db. In this case, a Quick export as a .sql file was sufficient. In case anything else went wrong, at least I could easily restore this table as it was before I’d touched it.
Backup done, I went back into the wp-options table and edited the stylesheet field to also be ‘graphene’. I refreshed the page and I was back in business.
Lesson being, if you break your WP site with a bad theme update, you might have a look in the WP database to see if a stylesheet and/or template fix might get you back up and running. As long as you’re careful and back up anything you might break, this might be the easiest way of fixing a bad update.
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