Theme shows a white screen on a fresh WP install

[schrauger]

The theme crashes if you install this on a fresh WP instance. There is one extra setting that must take place for the theme to work.

WP Admins need to first change an option in Settings->Reading. The Your homepage displays option must be set to A static page with the homepage defined. If it's set to Your latest posts, the theme will crash.

You can modify this setting in PHP, so it might be prudent to add code to do this when activating this theme, since this theme doesn't work when the setting isn't set properly.

update_option( 'page_on_front', $the_page_ID );
update_option( 'show_on_front', 'page' );

See also:

https://kuttler.eu/en/code/set-static-front-page-and-blog-page-programmatically-in-wordpress/

[jmbarne3]

Hello! Could you provide us with the version you're currently using on your site?

The way WordPress template system works, WordPress is going to attempt the following:

1. If no static home page is selected, then load latest posts.
2. If a front-page.php template is available in the theme, use it first. We don't have a front-page.php specified, so it moves onto the next case.
3. Since we're using latest posts at this point, it will now look for a home.php template. We don't have one of these in the theme either, so it moves onto the next step.
4. When all of the above fails, it gets the index.php template file - which must exist in a theme - and which we do have in this theme here.

I took the following steps in attempting to reproduce the problem locally. If you did something other than these steps, please let us know so we can try again to reproduce it:

1. Installed the theme by pulling it down via git into my theme directory.
2. Created a new site on my local multisite.
3. Enabled the theme for the new site.
4. Went to the dashboard of the new site and enabled the theme.
5. Went to the homepage and saw an error was being thrown about get_field not being defined.
6. Activated the Advanced Custom Fields plugin.
7. Went back to the homepage and got the default "Latest Posts" version of the homepage.

In addition to replying with your setup steps (if any are different) and the version of the theme you're running, if you could message us via slack with some details on your hosting, I think it may be related to the issue.

Thank you!

[schrauger]

I'm working with our college's IT department to get WordPress set up on their Windows IIS servers. It's their first WordPress site, so we've been working on multiple issues. You're probably correct in that it's likely a configuration issue. I was able to set up a fresh install on my local machine (running linux, nginx, mysql, php7) without any issues after following the normal setup steps.

The college IT servers are running Windows IIS with PHP 7. I only have experience with Linux servers, so I'm helping them mainly by finding articles about hosting WordPress on IIS and giving directions based on that.

Do you know of any IIS specific configuration that needs to happen for this theme to work correctly?

[schrauger]

@jmbarne3 Is there a way to debug the issue we're seeing? This is the first WordPress site that our IT department has set up, so I'm trying to help them in any way I can.

[cjg89]

@schrauger Sorry, @jmbarne3 has been out for a few days. I'm not sure that we can help much with Windows-specific debugging, but have you tried enabling WordPress's built-in debug mode (WP_DEBUG)? https://codex.wordpress.org/Debugging_in_WordPress