Custom WordPress Theming Day 2 – The debugging begins

Well, looks like my plans have officially changed here on DAY 2! I fully intended to activate my theme today after checking out the front end and seeing that all links worked, images displayed, and so forth. I was sorta proud of myself until I actually performed the activation… then the proverbial excrement impacted the proverbial windmill.

So the FRONT END seems to be working perfectly, but the back end is suffering some considerable problems. Here’s the list I’ve compiled so far:

1. Cannot activate theme (properly – it activates, but with an error “Looks like something’s gone wrong. Wait a couple seconds, and then try again.”) Directly from the theme library it seems to activate with no errors, but all these other problems after activating tell me it is NOT.
2. Cannot access media library – just a spinning progress wheel.
3. Cannot upload media items – “An error occurred in the upload. Please try again later.” HOWEVER… it shows up in the media library all the same.
4. Cannot save or publish post drafts or pages – “Publishing failed. The response is not a valid JSON response.”

My gut tells me that most of these are probably related to just a couple of issues – maybe even just one – but that’s just a suspicion. I’m going to activate WordPress debugging mode and see what the site barfs up when I try these things again.

Technically the theme was not ready for activation. I’m maybe a quarter of the way through the theme creation tutorial, and so there’s most likely something farther down the line that addresses these things… but I want the activation to happen ASAP so as to be a part of the documentation of the process. I’m taking some liberties with the tutorial and most likely extending the timeline on completing it, but it’s the way I have to do things, and I think in the end all this mucking about out of order will actually serve to make my understanding of the system that much better.

So I’m off to do what I need to do – and I’ll most certainly report what I find back here… when I eventually find it :/