Category: tech support

Blank WordPress pages, but no errors? Do you have a theme active?

Posted on by Wes

Did you know it was possible to not have a theme active in WordPress? Seems like it shouldn’t be possible, or something that should throw an error but apparently you can accidentally wind up in this state.

The Symptom…

After attempting to replicate my current website site locally I found myself faced by an especially fun problem: an empty white void where my website should be.

What made it even more fun was: there weren’t any errors. Nothing going into logs, E_ALL was enabled, etc. Intentionally adding errors to index.php or other places worked like a charm; errors appeared! Perhaps stepping through execution via XDebug would help but, alas… getting PHPStorm and XDebug to talk to each other was turning into a 2 hour job this time around (devilbox docs, unfortunately, not helping this time) so I needed to consider other “turn a knob and see what happens” diagnostics.

The Fix…

I guessed that, perhaps, the local version of my theme had become inconsistent with the live version somehow and I should just switch to something else. Since using the site directly wasn’t working, I grabbed the ever-so-useful WP CLI to switch it.
So, I took a look at what I could pick from, and….

devilbox@php-7.4.33 in /shared/httpd/westonwedding $ wp theme status
6 installed themes:
  I blanktheme        1
 UI twentyseventeen   1.4
  I twentytwentyfour  1.1
  I twentytwentythree 1.4
  I twentytwentytwo   1.7
  I wawcotuxedo       1.0.0

… apparently had no active themes?? That would certainly be a good reason to have no visible page!
Would activating my theme really fix it, though?

devilbox@php-7.4.33 in /shared/httpd/westonwedding $ wp theme activate wawcotuxedo
Success: Switched to 'Wawco Tuxedo' theme.
devilbox@php-7.4.33 in /shared/httpd/westonwedding $ wp theme status
6 installed themes:
  I blanktheme        1
 UI twentyseventeen   1.4
  I twentytwentyfour  1.1
  I twentytwentythree 1.4
  I twentytwentytwo   1.7
  A wawcotuxedo       1.0.0

Yes… yes it did. My website was back. But I ultimately have no idea why this happened to begin with.

This isn’t the most informative blog post, but I thought maybe this would help someone else out there with a similar problem. I can only assume my export of my database was incomplete or got truncated in some relatively harmless way. Not sure how that happens, though!


Lumio/Planar Crystal Touch Manager – A Dangerous Tool

Posted on by Wes

Disclaimer right up front: If you have a reason to believe you should be considering using the Lumio Crystal Touch Manager to make changes to your older Planar (or other Lumio-based) touchscreen, I recommend you don’t even try. If you have a client, convince them a different display or find a way to use the screen as-is. There is NO UNDO BUTTON. If the Touch Manager messes up your device and you can’t get it to work correctly, you are on your own; there is no support out there for you and there is no “Factory Reset.” During my own issues I was forced to navigate archived versions of the Lumio website because they had neglected to pay their hosting for a while!

I especially recommend not proceeding if you are on a non-Windows system and have encountered problems that make you believe the Crystal Touch Manager is necessary. Lumio’s Mac and Linux software completely mis-configured my touchscreen and there was never a way to get it to work, in my experience.

My Use Case

This very brief guide comes from my own experiences and is not necessarily comprehensive; I needed to rotate a Planar PS4660T to a portrait orientation (90 degrees) and connect to to a Mac Mini. Unfortunately, Mac OSX is not as touch-friendly as the Windows 8 and 10 operating systems are. If you rotate a display 90 degrees in the Display settings in Mac OSX, the touch input isn’t rotated with it! This meant I needed to reconfigure the touchscreen hardware directly so that touch input would be provided to the operating system in a way that would match the new screen orientation.

Use the Lumio Crystal Touch Manager on Windows

The software and driver downloads for my planar screen provided me a link to the Lumio Crystal Touch Manager. This software is probably old, and is certainly barely compatible with any recent operating system versions. In addition to grabbing the “vendor recommended” version, I’d suggest digging up a more recent version. Going to Lumio.com directly for Crystal Touch Manager is obviously the way to go… but you might be forced to go digging up an archived copy of Lumio Crystal Touch manager if they forget to pay their web hosting bills again!

However you get to the Touch Manager downloads, please be sure to get the Windows version! Again, if you don’t have a Windows version, I wouldn’t even try. The Mac software totally botched the configuration of my Planar touch functionality and only the Windows version of the software could fix the problem.

Getting the thing to work

Run Crystal Touch Manager. Do the tabs all show information loaded from touch device, or are they blank or filled with weird values? Does the version tab show complete information, or is it partially empty or show gibberish like “384X???92” in the Serial Number field?

Chances are, you’re going to see the weird gibberish. Immediately close the software if you do, taking great care to make sure you do NOT save your changes if you are prompted to do so. Then, try one of the following:

  • Get the app configured to run in compatibility mode. I got my best results from using Win XP Service Pack 3.
  • Remove the lumio touch device from Windows. This can be done from the Control Panel, within the Devices and Printers window. Plug it back in after you do it!
  • Unplug and power off the Lumio device for a little while and then try again.

This isn’t really a comprehensive troubleshooting list, unfortunately, and I imagine there are probably additional sources of problems that I never encountered. Due to time constraints I didn’t get to fully explore this issue, but I hope that if you stumbled here after “breaking” your Lumio-driven touchscreen that this helps you save the day like I did!