Can't access my admin dashboard

Hi Robert,

So, you’re trying to log in to your site via either http://www.yoursite.com/wp-admin or /wp-login.php and not having any luck, eh? That is, you’re able to log in but once you do everything is white, right?

If so, usually this means something has crashed. Odd that it would correlate with changing to a French version. That is, when things crash that usually means there’s some kind of 3rd party (think theme and/or plugins) integration issue. And the quick solution is to switch back to the default theme and deactivate all active plugins.

Here’s some info about white pages (aka, The White Screen of Death):

http://codex.wordpress.org/Common_WordPress_Errors#The_White_Screen_of_Death

As for switching back to the default theme and deactivating your plugins for now, try these instructions:

Steps to revert back to default theme:
1. Via FTP, change the name of your current theme’s folder to something different
2. Log in to your site (e.g., http://www.mysite.com/wp-admin)
3. Go to Appearance > Themes
–> the system will report “The active theme is broken. Reverting to the default theme.”

And that’s it. As stated, you’ve been reverted to the default theme.

Steps to deactivate all plugins:
1. Via FTP, change the name of your plugin’s folder to something different
2. Log in to your site (e.g., http://www.mysite.com/wp-admin)
3. Go to Plugins > Installed Plugins
–> the system will report, for each plugin that was deactivated, “The plugin [plugin name] has been deactivated due to an error: Plugin file does not exist.”

And that’s it. Now all your plugins have been deactivated.

Of course, once you gain access to the site, you’ll want to rename the theme and plugins folders back to what they were. Then, you’ll want to reactivate the theme and plugins. But, reactivate the theme first, then test to see if the issue returns. If not, reactivate one plugin at a time, testing after each activation, until the issue returns. Then deactivate all plugins except for the last one activated and switch back to the default theme and test again. With the goal of reproducing the issue with a default WordPress install and just the one suspect plugin or possibly theme.

Once the culprit theme and/or plugin(s) have been determined, then it’s just a simple matter of reporting your case on the author(s) support site(s).

You’re very welcome!

Okay, sounds like a plan Robert! 🙂

Hi Robert,

Sorry to hear this. Who is your web host? I ask because way back when I used Go Daddy, I had to find out the hard way that when one uses Go Daddy they have to change the typical MySQL hostname from localhost to something much more specific. That is, this is what it normally looks like in wp-config.php:

/** MySQL hostname */
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');

and, as an example, here’s what it should look like if one uses Go Daddy:

/** MySQL hostname */
define('DB_HOST', 'mysql69.secureserver.net');

More about the above can be found here:

https://support.godaddy.com/help/article/5111/why-is-wordpress-unable-to-connect-to-my-database-during-install

This is not to say you are using Go Daddy. But it is an example of a gotcha when trying to setup wp-config.php for certain hosts. For sure, unless somehow you deleted your database which I highly doubt, your issue at hand is that for some reason your wp-config.php credentials are not correct and/or something is not allowing the transmission of data to be made to your database.

Please do take a look at the following info about wp-config.php:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php

As well as this helpful guide and see if you might get up and going:

http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-fix-the-error-establishing-a-database-connection-in-wordpress/

P.S., Unless you deleted your database, where all your posts, pages, etcetera are stored, you really haven’t lost much or anything at all. So, I highly suggest going through all the steps to install WordPress again and seeing if you missed anything:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress#Detailed_Instructions

Hope this helps!