wp-admin blank in a clean install of WordPress on PHP 5.4

A clean install of WordPress 3.4.2 is giving a blank screen when logging into the admin panel. This is due to the following resources not loading in Chrome:

GET /wp-admin/  /wp-admin/:32
GET /wp-admin/load-styles.php?c=0&dir=ltr&load=wp-jquery-ui-dialog&ver=3.4.2  /wp-admin/:32
GET /wp-admin/load-scripts.php?c=0&load=jquery,utils&ver=3.4.2  /wp-admin/:32
GET /wp-admin/load-styles.php?c=0&dir=ltr&load=admin-bar,wp-admin&ver=3.4.2  /wp-admin/:26
GET /wp-admin/load-scripts.php?c=0&load=admin-bar,hoverIntent,common,jquery-color,wp-ajax-response,wp-lists,quicktags,jquery-query,admin-comments,jquery-ui-core,jquery-ui-widget,jquery-ui-mouse,jquery-ui-sortable,postbox,dashboard,thickbox,plugin-install,media-upload,word-count,jquery-ui-resizable,jquery-ui-draggable,jquery-ui-button,jquery-ui-position,jquery-ui-dialog,wpdialogs,wplink,wpdialogs-popup&ver=3.4.2  /wp-admin/:32

However, visiting these links directly returns the contents as normal.

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There are no entries in Apache’s error log for this.

I have found that if I add the following line just before echo $out; in wp-admin/load-scripts.php and load-styles.php, the page loads the assets correctly, aside from TinyMCE:

header('Content-Length: ' . strlen($out));

Similarly, if I add the following line to my wp-config.php the admin panel loads correctly (as it bypasses load-X.php):

define('CONCATENATE_SCRIPTS', false);

Content does display correctly in Firefox however.

Is this a bug? If so, is the issue already known?


The only oddities about my setup are that I am running PHP version 5.4.8-1~precise+1, obtained from Ondřej’s PPA, on Apache/2.2.22 (on Ubuntu).

The most common suggestion seems to be that it is a problem with my configuration, rather than WordPress – my Apache install is fairly standard, the VirtualHost for this blog configured as so:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName example.com

    DocumentRoot /var/www/wordpress
    <Directory /var/www/wordpress>
        Order allow,deny
        allow from all
        Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks
    </Directory>

    ErrorLog /var/log/www/wordpress/error.log
    LogLevel warn
    CustomLog /var/log/www/wordpress/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

The WordPress install has no extra themes, plugins and whatnot. It is a simple download from WordPress.org that has been configured using the installer.

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1 comment

  1. I believe I’ve found a root to the problem. I recently upgraded PHP from apt and unbeknownst to me it now uses apache2filter rather than apache2.

    Not entirely sure what triggered that, but it’s not how I set it up. Switching over to nginx for example works fine (it also fixes an issue with xmlrpc.php not loading) – so the problem is with apache2filter’s default configuration. Sorry for a bogus question!