Wordpress update 4.0.1 broke my website built in Roots 7.0.0

Wordpress auto update broke the website built in Roots 7.0.0.

I was not able to log into the admin dashboard. It just gave me a white screen of death. When I changed the theme to twentyfourteen in the database, problem solved. When I reactivated roots 7.0.0, white screen of death again. I was surprise when I came here to see that no one else is reporting this.

I imagine that I can take the wp-admin file form worpdress 4.0.0, upload and overwrite the 4.0.1 wp-admin file or revert entirely to 4.0.0 and that should likely solve the problem temporarily, but I still need to update wordpress. So it seems the problem with Roots 7.0.0 needs to be solved.

I don’t really know what could be causing the problem. Can someone point me in the direction that I need to be heading to solve this problem.

Thanks.

Well a default Roots installation won’t break with the update, guaranteed.

Have you checked your server logs?

It could be a plugin issue (doubtful though because you say it works with twentyfourteen) but you might try deactivating all plugins and activating Roots. If it’s still blank then you’ll need to work through any code that didn’t ship with Roots. Comment out all custom filters, actions, and custom PHP in your Roots template files and then begin uncommenting one by one to find the culprit.

Let us know what you find!

Its almost certainly a PHP fatal error causing the white screen of death. You could also try setting WP_DEBUG to true in wp-config.php to see if any errors are displayed.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Debugging_in_WordPress

I already set WP_DEBUG to true in wp-config long ago. That’s one of the first things I did. No errors were showing. Thanks for trying to help though.

Start with server logs first. If you’re not seeing anything then proceed debugging your filters/actions/functions.

Do you have any of the plugins listed in this post? https://wordpress.org/support/topic/issues-with-wordpress-401-and-shortcodes?replies=2

Some more context can be found here: http://wptavern.com/wordpress-4-0-1-exposes-bad-development-practices-used-in-some-plugins

Alternatively, I sort of doubt it, but these plugins are causing issues because of their misuse of Shortcodes, basically using their own versions of shortcodes and skipping the WP functions to actually parse the shortcodes. If you did something similar in your theme, that could also be why you got the WSOD.

Please let us know what you find in the logs. We haven’t seen anything breaking yet in Roots and WP 4.0.1, and many people were automatically updated to it. So we’d like to know what is causing your issue.