There is really no interplay between the two (unless you are using our blog linking plugin) and that is especially true of the editors as the SP editor is not loaded in the admin side of the site where blog posts are written.

So one or two obvious questions first…

You mention that the SP core plugin is updated to the latest version. Is the same true of any SP plugins you may be using (if any)?

Are you using the blog linking plugin and if so, what happens if you just deactivate that and leave the core forum up and running?

I was using the blog-linking plugin. I haven’t thought to disable it, but I can try to do that now.

By the way, all SP plug-ins were updated as well. The blog-linking feature was enabled originally because we want to provide users who are mostly Forum centric to find a way to our blog posts.

UPDATE: Disabling the blog-linking plug-in appeared to have solved the white page and editor issue. I can’t believe that this one sub-plugin, which once use to work perfectly, was the culprit behind our issue and the reason why we had to take our forum offline for several months.

We would still like to continue using the blog-linking feature, so how can we resolve this issue?

It is almost certainly conflicting with another component you have active on the site. Trouble is you will need to have it active and try to use it to see any reports of a conflict. Most probably the conflict is javaScript related so would you be able to activate the plugin – try and use it and utilise the browser web console to see if any errors get reported (these show up in red)?

There is a guide to using the console here: https://simple-press.com/documentation/codex/faq/how-to/how-to-use-your-web-browser-console/ – it really is very easy to do…

look at the error log and see what is reported… perhaps your sever does not have mbstring enabled in php?

Our site server log is not yielding any results to indicate an issue. I am not quite sure where to go on from here. From what I can remember, this was not an issue for years with the same theme and plug-in, but became problematic in the past few months. It all goes away when that particular plug-in is not in play.

you can ignore my mbstring comment- was thinking of different plugin…

perhaps turn on wp debug and see if the error comes to the screen…  https://codex.wordpress.org/WP_DEBUG

This is what we are now pulling up in our error log after re-activating the blog-link post:

[19-Jun-2016 23:07:13 UTC] WordPress database error Duplicate key name ‘post_idx’ for query ALTER TABLE wp_sflinks ADD KEY post_idx (post_id), ADD KEY forum_idx (forum_id), ADD KEY topic_idx (topic_id); made by include(‘/plugins/simple-press/admin/panel-plugins/spa-plugins.php’), spa_save_plugin_activation, sp_activate_sp_plugin, do_action(‘sph_activate_blog-linking/sp-linking-plugin.php’), call_user_func_array, sp_linking_install, sp_linking_do_install, spdb_query

[19-Jun-2016 23:07:13 UTC] WordPress database error Duplicate key name ‘blog_post_idx’ for query ALTER TABLE wp_sftopics ADD KEY blog_post_idx (blog_post_id); made by include(‘/plugins/simple-press/admin/panel-plugins/spa-plugins.php’), spa_save_plugin_activation, sp_activate_sp_plugin, do_action(‘sph_activate_blog-linking/sp-linking-plugin.php’), call_user_func_array, sp_linking_install, sp_linking_do_install, spdb_query

those wont be an issue… its trying to upgrade the database at plugin activation (we can check why)… but wont be occurring just on execution… you can verify this by clearing the log and then causing your white screen to occur again and then checking the log again…

for information, what version of wp, sp and blog linking plugin?

• SP Version 5.6.7 
• Blog Post Linking Version 1.2.18
• WordPress Version 4.5.2

The Editor does show with the BP Linking plug-in installed now, however, I do continue to get the White Page after I publish the post (regular WP blog post). Once I refresh the post listings, the posts does show it published. However, it appears that we’re having an issue with the dashboard not returning to the post after we click on “Publish”, as it normally should. Again, this problem disappears as soon as I deactive that BPL plug-in.

After disabling the BPL plug-in, I pulled my server error log and so far I don’t see any new entries.  

did you try the wp debug switch as requested?  would like to see if anything is displayed when you do a post and get the white screen…

Mr Papa said
did you try the wp debug switch as requested?  would like to see if anything is displayed when you do a post and get the white screen…  

Yes, we have modified the config file to show ‘true’, however, we immediately get a white page with errors. The site won’t load unless we revert back to the old config without the debug mode on. Apparently, setting the site to debug mode could result in these deprecated modes that we’re experiencing? In addition, because this is a live site, we can’t afford to have the site down for a good length of time.

Here are the top level message that pops-up;

Deprecated: mysql_connect(): The mysql extension is deprecated and will be removed in the future: use mysqli or PDO instead in /home/inception/public_html/wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 1520

Sorry about the delay.

My initial impression is that there is something fishy going on here. WordPress has not used mysql_connect() for quite a long time – unless the preferred mysqli library is not installed – which would be unusual. They certainly do not use it at line 1520 although they DO use the mysqli equivalent.

I would suggest before we go any further it would be worth checking with your host the PHP and MYSQL version numbers and, specifically, whether your PHP has the mysqli library installed.

However, I would doubt that the lack of that library would cause the white screen. That sounds like a php ‘fatal error’. If it is then it would be reported in the error log (which is what the wp debug setting should show on the screen except for the intervention of the mysql issue). So can you taker a look at your php error log? If you do not know where it is then you can usually get to look at it via the hosting control panel.

You may have many entries but you are specifically looking for one marked as ‘fatal error’ following the white screen occurence,

I am trying to find a way to generate and retrieve a PHP error log. I wanted to note that we have been running 10.0.25-MariaDB for the past few months. We made the change after we noticed the initial issue with the SP plug-in. The site has run a bit more efficiently after upgrading from an outdated version of MySQL to Maria.

Regarding these missing libraries and such. I do have WHM access and could try to add any missing modules via easyapache. I’m just not sure what modules I should be looking for in the exhaustive options list??