Did a video for solving the White Screen of Death for Wordpress. You can find the video here.

Emma Frost (White Queen) - character from XMen. Nothing to do with the White Screen of death

I am writing a chess publishing program that can take annotations and create javascript animated chess boards so that webmasters can easily show a chess game that has taken place easily on their website.

Check out ChessPublisher.com for this cool new tool.

It involves getting WordPress sessions and using WordPress authentication process to integrate with my publishing tool. I needed this because I wanted a simple membership login system to require only members to be able to use the tool.

It was quite easy and I’ll post the details later when I finish my week long coverage of the MalaysiaOpen.net. Yes, it’s a chess competition and I admit to being a complete chess geek

Today it is exactly three years ago since PHP 5 has been released. In those three years it has seen many improvements over PHP 4. PHP 5 is fast, stable & production-ready and as PHP 6 is on the way, PHP 4 will be discontinued.

The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.

~ taken from PHP.net first page

Well it’s about time. Now if only my webhosts would changeover to PHP5 For documentation on migration for PHP 4 to PHP 5, we would like to point you to our migration guide. There is additional information available in the PHP 5.0 to PHP 5.1 and PHP 5.1 to PHP 5.2 migration guides as well.

I read from this from php.about.com

You’ve uploaded your PHP page, and went to view it. Instead of seeing what you expected you see nothing. A blank screen (often white), no data, no error, no title, nothing. You view the source…. it’s blank. What happened?

A. The most common reason for this problem is that you’re missing a character somewhere. By simply leaving out a ‘ or } or ; somewhere, your PHP won’t work. You don’t get an error, you will simply get a blank screen.

~ Angela Bradley (PHP White Screen)

Well I encounter this very often in my everyday work as a PHP programmer. However it’s not for the reasons Angela Bradley gives.

Mine is because of the error message has been turned off at the webserver. There is specific reasons for this because of certain legacy codes throwing warning messages which has to be surpressed. I recently also hit this problem while installing WordPress and found a nice fix for it.

It’s very frustrating to debug errors such as this as there is no helpful messages telling you what went wrong. Ways of solving it:

• turn on the error reporting from php.ini
• open the Apache error log text file and scroll down to see the last error

Update: Found a solution for the White Screen of Death

Hi, I’m a PHP developer and I love this programming language! I will post any interesting material related to PHP here as a blog is the most convenient and fastest way to post something.