How to fix empty dashboard issue in WordPress?

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A site of my company uses blog on WordPress 3.3.1 with theme based on Twenty Ten. Last week I upgraded Apache and PHP on our production server. Afterwards the dashboard refused to work. When a user logs in, a blank dashboard appears. A menu with links is still present, but none of the links work, so one cannot create new posts etc. In the page source I see the following message:

Fatal error: Access to undeclared static property: WP_Screen::$this in
blog/wp-admin/includes/screen.php on line 706

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There were no changes to WordPress configuration made and no new plugins installed. How to fix the issue?

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4 comments

  1. There is a bug in WordPress 3.3.1 causing the issue. It may affect other versions as well.

    To solve the issue you can update WordPress to the current stable release and do integration testing afterwards. Or you can do a quick bug fix.

    To fix the bug:

    1. Open file blog/wp-admin/includes/screen.php in your favorite text editor.
    2. On line 706 find the following PHP statement: <?php echo self::$this->_help_sidebar; ?>
    3. Replace it with the statement: <?php echo $this->_help_sidebar; ?>
    4. Save your changes.

    Hope it helps you.

  2. Dmitry’s answer of replacing the wrong PHP statement appears best to me:

    Replace <?php echo self::$this->_help_sidebar; ?>

    With <?php echo $this->_help_sidebar; ?>

  3. you have three options

    • Downgrade the php – you probably not going to like it
    • Upgrade wordpres – you running 3.3.1? it is upgrade time in any case
    • Fix the error in core – Not as bad as it sound, as “screen” code controls the help screen and you might not need help in operating wordpress any longer.

  4. Even though you haven’t made any configuration changes or added new plugins to WordPress, upgrading the underlying PHP version could be causing a conflict with one of the plugins you’d already been using successfully.

    Since you can’t get to your admin dashboard to disable plugins, try simply re-naming your /wp-content/plugins folder to something like /wp-content/plugins-OLD and then try to access the admin again.

    If you can successfully get in after disabling your plugins, then you can go about re-enabling them 1 by 1 to see which one is possibly the culprit and leave it disabled until you upgrade the core of WordPress and the plugin itself to the latest versions that hopefully don’t have these problems.

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