Theme activation produces the white (blank) screen problem

I obtained a theme (iblog 3.1.2) from the www.remarpro.com website and installed it as specified in the WP documentation. Then I signed on as admin and activated it unfortunately lacking the wisdom to preview first. The consequence is that my blog went completely blank (i.e., unable to do anything via the browser). Nothing but a completely blank white screen.

From reading in this forum, it seems that this is the WordPress (WP) equivalent of the blue screen of death provided by Windows but with much less information that might help provide a clue about what went wrong. My immediate thought was it had to be the theme activation which caused it and thought that if I prevented WP from being able to access the bad theme that WP might at least decide to use either the default theme or possibly another available theme. If so this would at least allow me to get back into the admin dashboard and do some troubleshooting. Therefore I renamed ./wordpress/wp-content/themes/iblog to ./wordpress/wp-content/themes/iblog.bad and rebooted the server only to find the same blank screen problem.

I then came to this forum and found that this problem is fairly common. Apparently it can be caused by many different things. However nothing I found would overcome the problem. There was lots of advice about reinstalling WP that seemed like a last resort especially when we’re in dart throwing mode.

The good news here is that while I failed to preview the theme before activating it I was wise enough to be trying out the new theme on a test system that pretty much mirrored my live blog. Therefore, I decided that exporting the database from my live blog for import into the test system might be a good path for recovery. However, before doing that I decided to browse the database on the defective system using phpmyadmin. This quickly lead to finding values in the wp-options table column named option-name of “template” and “stylesheet”. The corresponding value in the column named option-value for each was “iblog”. Therefore I changed “iblog” to “default” for both “template” and “stylesheet”, which also happened to be the previously activated theme.

This caused WP to resume displaying pages formatted according to the default theme and I could login to the admin dashboard. Interestingly the Appearance page showed the “Current Theme” as “iblog” even though the site was clearly running on the “default” theme. Note: I had by now renamed the “iblog.bad” directory back to “iblog”. Therefore, I performed the activate action on the default theme which had the affect of showing “default” as the current theme. At this point there is no evidence of anything wrong. Of course this is a test site that doesn’t get exercised a lot so there could be residual problems still laying in the weeds to appear at some future time but the dreaded white (blank) screen problem previously experienced is no longer occurring.

My suspicion is that the version of “iblog” that I was trying to activate may require a more current release of WP then the one on my test system (2.9.2). However, I’m now also more sensitive to the fact that the themes being offered at www.remarpro.com do not specify very good information about dependencies on the WP release level, which is kind of inviting people to have experiences such as this.

I hope this problem description helps someone.