The whole page is hitting a fatal error which is stopping it displaying. SO – let’s talk your code. WordPress plugins will never work if there are two instances. You must only have one. The normal update procedure (automatic or manual) is to replace the current one with the changed folders/files. So basically – you need to work out which is the older one and delete it.

So – do you know which is the older one?

I am kind of curious how it was possible to end up with 2 and when it happened. Not sure why it should show up for some and not others either. Not even sure of you are running the current version of course!

I only have one activated, but I have versions 5.3.4 and version 5.4.1 showing up in my plugin list. 5.4.1 is active.

Nether of which is current! so I hope you are not running WordPress 3,9 which does require SP 5.5.0

No currently using wp 3.7.3.

same thing though… you cannot have multiple copies of a plugin around…  why are you keeping the 5.3.1 version at this point?

I haven’t deleted 5.3.1 because as mentioned above I renamed the simple-press folder for 5.3.1 via ftp to see if I could safely delete and the forum stopped working, so it appeared that somehow the latest version (5.4.1) was using files from what I thought was the old not needed folder.

So for this reason I have held back from deleting anything in fear of losing 2 years worth of forum posts.

Will the latest version of simple-press run on wp 3.7.3? As I am considering backing up the database tables and starting from scratch, and deleting both versions, downloading and installing the latest version and importing the database tables, would that work?

Straight up then no – the latest SP will NOT work on earlier versions of WP properly. It is dependent upon WP 3.9 as a lot of changes went on in that version that we needed to support. Same goes for the majority of our SP plugins.

Just changing the folder name of an old plugin version is not a guarantee that it will have no effect on processing althp8gh it doers limit things. And your post data is all stored in the database – nothing is stored in the plugin code files. Uploaded images and other resources are stored in the locations specified which, by default, would be under wp-content/sp-resources. So no forum, topic, post, user data etc., which is all – like your WP blog posts – stored in the database.

It doesn’t sound to me like there is any point uninstalling/reinstalling anything. Far better to pinpoint what the issue is bit first I still believe the WordPress plugin folder needs to be cleaned up…

But yes – always make full database backups before changes. But removing an old, defunct, WP plugin should not have any detrimental effect.

OK, I have deleted 5.3.4 and all it’s associated files.

I deactivated 5.4.1 cleared all caches (W3 Total cache)

I then activated 5.4.1 and cleared all caches

I then loaded up the forum (http://www.silversurfers.com/forum/) and success it was there – 5 minutes later it was gone again. I had changed nothing!

What are the next steps I should take?

I remain curious as to why this has started to happen? If it worked and then stopped working it always means that something has changed somewhere. A new or updated SP plugin perhaps? Or a new Wp theme. It really can not just’ happen’.

Anyway – the next step is to look in the error log. You are looking for a repeated ‘fatal error’ (Not notices or warnings)…

This is the only error issue I have found in the logs:

This error was way back in March and the forum has worked since then.

The issue still remains…

If I de-activate the forum and re-activate it I can get the forum to appear at http://www.silversurfers.com/forum/ then if I leave it for 5 minutes navigate back to the homepage and then try to access the forum it is a blank page again.

Using Safari the forum, does not show whether you are logged in or out. however in Chrome the forum will show when logged in but not when logged out. This might be a red herring due to Chrome’s sticky cache. I do have W3 total cache running and am going to try de-activating it to see if that is causing any issues.

Have you done what that first error tells you to – which is to run repair againstt he database tables? Because that should be your fist task.

The tables in question are now returning a status of ok.

So there has to be other errors. This is a typical php fatal error behaviour. Are you looking at your server php error log?