At Ann Arbor Give Camp this year, I worked on a team looking into donation management options for non-profits. Thanks to Dr. Milastname (it would be inappropriate to reveal his true identity), we found CiviCRM and spent much of the weekend getting familiar with its deployment and functionality inside of WordPress. CiviCRM integration with WordPress is a relatively new feature, so it was not totally unsurprising that we encountered one or two issues. The first and by far the biggest problem we encountered was the White Screen of Death (WSOD).
After some debugging (which involved editing a couple of PHP files inside of the WordPress and CiviCRM systems), we discovered that a PHP add-in used by CiviCRM for templating was relying on the `open_basedir` variable and this was not set on our IIS-based system. This caused the templating add-in to fail, halting the rendering of the CiviCRM admin screen and resulting in the WSOD.
To rectify this problem, I edited `wp_config.php` to introduce the `open_basedir` variable just before the `require` statement for `wp_settings.php`. I set the variable to the path of the WordPress deployment (`ABSPATH`) and refreshed the CiviCRM admin screen.
ini_set('open_basedir', ABSPATH);
This fixed the WSOD and enabled us to continue our evaluation of CiviCRM1. We also raised an issue against the CiviCRM project and added a post to the CiviCRM forms, ensuring the lessons we learned would benefit future users of CiviCRM.
- And discover a bug that I had introduced all by myself [↩]