I just spent the last couple of hours trying to work out why the admin section of my site wasn’t being displayed after login. I tried many things including overwriting the admin section with a clean version, installing Wordpress from scratch and exporting the old database into the new one, as well as copying the wp-content directory from old to new.
None of what i tried worked. The page remained blank upon loading. All that was being displayed in the admin section was the title and when i viewed the source code only the start of the page up to a point was being loaded. I then located the file that was being loaded and realised that the point that it was being loaded to was do_action(’admin_head’);.
I proceeded to comment this out to see what would happen and what do you know, the admin section worked. Even more curious was the fact that now that i had disabled this section of the code the wp version check plugin was no longer being displayed due to being loaded with the do_action(’admin_head’).
After discovering this i disabled the plugin and uncommented the do_action(’admin_head’) section. Again the admin section loaded.
This was extremely strange as i had made no changes since this last worked. I decided to take a look at the plugin’s website which wasn’t loading. I then took a look in the plugin’s file and saw that it was loading the update information from the site which appeared to be down.
So when the plugin was being loaded with the admin_head it was unable to connect to the server it was retrieving the information from which was halting the remaining loading of the admin page.
It was a real pain in the ass to discover something so small, which could have been avoided by timing out the plugin script and continuing to load the remainder of the page. Anyway it’s fixed up now, anyone else using the plugin may experience the same problems of the admin page not loading after login. If so just comment out the do_action(’admin_head’); section of the admin_header.php file so you can access the plugins section to disable the plugin for the time being.
Update
The site that the plugin was using for update information is back online now so the plugin can be re-activated.
