Today, we came across with an issue on a Drupal site that we manage. Our admin page is BLANK. We got so scare because we have not backed up this site yet and we have put weeks of work on customizing this Drupal site. It will suck if all of it got deleted. Yes, we forgot to back it up.

Anyway, searching through the web we found several articles on “drupal admin page is blank” keyword.

There are several ways that this might have occurred.

– Not enough memory allocated for Drupal on your server
Solution: Incease your php installation memory (php.ini).

– The Update module is trying to check for updates but your server is blocking it.
Solution: Disable the the update module

e.g. Login to your database and update the ‘system’ table. Or you can do what we did and add the sql update code to it.

Something similar to this:

update system set status=0, throttle=0, bootstrap=0 where filename = ‘modules/update/update.module';

– Bad Drupal installation
Solution: Re install your Drupal installation by running the install.php file again. You will need to double check your settings.php file.

– Errors on your themes template
Solution: Double check for any changes made to your themes template files.

For us, it turned out one of our developer has edited the ‘template.php’ file. Once we undo his code changes, all is working.

We have to enable the ‘Display Error’ variable for troubleshooting this type error.
How to enable the ‘Display_error’ variable?

To troubleshoot in Drupal, you can enable the ‘display_error’ variable.

Add the following code to the end of your settings.php file under the ‘/sites/default’ folder

# To Allow showing of Errors

ini_set(‘display_errors’, 1);
Hope this help you