all import attempts return white screen (blank screen of death)

  • i’ve spent a couple days trolling this forum as well as google and it seems many people have the same problem but no solutions have been found. making yet another post just in case anyone has an answer.

    i am trying to import a movable type blog into a fresh install of wp 3.2.1 (initially was on 3.2 and upgraded in hopes it would solve the problem). i have tried the standard movable type/typepad importer as well as the movable type backup importer. all is well until submit the file i wish to import. on the screen directly after the import button i get nothing but a blank screen. i have enabled ALL error reporting and still get no errors, just a blank screen. here’s what i’ve done so far:

    Movable type export file: 483k

    wordpress settings:
    <?php error_reporting(E_ALL); ini_set(‘display_errors’, 1);
    define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’64M’);
    define(‘WPLANG’, ‘en-US’);
    define(‘WP_DEBUG’, true);

    wordpress plugins: none except the import plugin

    php 5.2.8 settings:
    memory: 2GB
    error_reporting: 6143 (all)
    upload max filesize: 80MB

    i’m pulling my hair out. this blog has posts back to 2006 so re-entering them is simply not an option. is there ANY way to get this blog migrated??

Viewing 8 replies - 16 through 23 (of 23 total)
  • Thread Starter kristinachilds

    (@kristinachilds)

    okay, after much learnining i activated trace logging and got an error report.

    fastcgi activity timeout. so theoretically all i have to do is increase the length of time the server allows before timeout?

    Yeah, that would certainly be worth a try. If the timeout is set very small, anyway. If the timeout is already fairly big, then the problem isn’t a short timeout, but rather a long-running process.

    See what the timeout is, and if it’s less than say, 120 seconds, increase it and see how you go.

    Don’t forget to put it back once your import has succeed though, because having a really long timeout when you don’t need one can mask other problems.

    Thread Starter kristinachilds

    (@kristinachilds)

    this presents a new problem (when will it end??)

    IIS says that fastcgi is configured, however there is no fcgiext.ini file. the api clearly says that cgi/fastcgi is running and the error is a fastcgi activity timeout, yet when i go into iis config the only module visible is cgi (set to a 15 min timeout).

    stumped again.

    Do you have a php.ini file somewhere? It may be that fastcgi is “timing out” because PHP is timing out. So changing the max timeout in php.ini could help.

    Thread Starter kristinachilds

    (@kristinachilds)

    php timeout settings are set obscenely high.

    i got the iis7 admin pack installed so i could finally modify the fastcgi timeout settings, however it didn’t solve the install problem. it doesn’t time out but it *still* doesn’t get to step 2 where the encrypted password is set.

    it also can’t send me a lost password email. i tried turning off the auto-generated password to hard set it to a password of my choosing and that didn’t seem to work either.

    AND, even though it doesn’t time out or install, it also doesn’t generate an error so now i REALLY don’t know what the problem is.

    Here’s a thought…can you run a local copy of wordpress, like with xampp or something, import it MT blog – then export a “native” WP file?

    I’m just looking for options…

    Thread Starter kristinachilds

    (@kristinachilds)

    i thought about that – making a clean install on one of my linux servers then exporting. that’s probably what i’ll end up doing.

    i’m just concerned that whatever this problem is will cause more problems down the road. it’s unsettling to have something liek this undiagnosed… it also sucks that the problem wins. grr

    In some ways, the problem is diagnosed. It appears to be a timeout issue.

    Unfortunately, working out where to adjust that timeout has proven elusive, but hopefully no other process your site ever needs to do would take as long as an import.

Viewing 8 replies - 16 through 23 (of 23 total)
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