How To Create a WordPress Child Theme
Help! My WordPress Site is Broken
So, you’ve downloaded WordPress and successfully installed it. Now you are excited about building your blog and getting everything set up. You’ve probably been perusing all the available themes for WordPress and have been trying them out trying to find the right look for your blog. This can be exciting and exhausting as well. But nevertheless it is definitely fun! Sometimes this fun can be interrupted by errors. One of the most common errors that I have come across is when the theme you are using disrupts your blog.
You will usually see a message that looks similar to the one below.
Fatal error: Cannot redeclare _verify_isactivate_widgets()
After seeing this you may have decided to log out and then log back in to your admin console hoping this would fix the error. It probably didn’t, but if it did, awesome!! Then you may have discovered that when you navigate to your blog site, there is nothing but white space. Uh oh, now what?
I’m not exactly sure what causes this error, but it is usually within the theme that you are currently using and it usually happens after changing back and forth between multiple themes. Fortunately, there is an easy fix.
Start by going to your blogs home directory. You can do this by either logging into your hosting account or by using an FTP client. For example, if you are hosting your blog with Bluehost, login to the Control Panel.
Once you are there, navigate to the WP-Content->Themes directory and make sure that the default theme, which is usually TwentyTen, is present in the directory.
Next, delete the current theme that you are using. Make sure to delete the entire folder.
Now, trying logging back into your blog’s admin console and you should be successful.
Of course, the theme it will be using is TwentyTen, but now you can download or activate another theme. Or you can download the same theme as before and it will more than likely work.
What this process does is gets rid of the theme that is causing the trouble and forces WordPress to fall back to the default theme. Once there, you can proceed forward once again and get a great looking blog put together!
Hope this helps any new users to WordPress!!
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Hi admin, I know this is an old entry, but I wanted to let you know that this is not a theme error but a worm, and the only way to fix it is by removing the infected code from every functions.php file from ALL the themes installed, or replacing the the functions file from good copies. Once the worm has infected a site it jumps from theme to theme, to might end up deleting every theme you have and it won’t make a difference.
Thanks for the comment. You could help other readers if you posted the line code that needs to be replaced/fixed.
Here is the Fix for the worm that P. Leon mentions:
http://retrohelix.com/2012/09/the-wordpress-boo-boo-turned-out-to-be-a-worm/
Appreciate that Donny!
Thank you. It works like a charm