Migrating multisite by upload, all pages blank

Support
1

Like the title says, I followed the instructions on " Installing ClassicPress | ClassicPress Documentation " using the “Migrating to ClassicPress without using the plugin” option, by FTP. The result is all pages are completely blank.

This may or may not be a factor, but my multisite, while updated to WordPress 6.9.4, started out pre-3.5 so some of the directories are different. There’s an explanation of the difference between pre-3.5 and post-3.5 at “What happened to my blogs.dir restoring a multisite? - UpdraftPlus”.

I already tried the plugin and got the same result, which is why I was trying the upload method.

So I’m kind of at a loss what do do next. I was hoping to use ClassicPress to avoid the AI crap that WP is foisting on us with v.7.

Expected behavior

My multisite should migrate more-or-less as is, though I expect to need to make some tweaks here and there.

Current behavior

Every page in the directory with the WordPress installation (a clone of my good site) is blank, and show source shows there’s nothing there.

Steps to reproduce

I don’t know that many people would be able to reproduce, since there probably aren’t a lot of pre-3.5 installations still out there. But what I did was the exact steps in “Migrating to ClassicPress without using the plugin” using FileZilla The URL is https://silver-gateway.com/etc2/.

Hoping someone can help :-). Thanks!

2

the issue might lay in the fact that the process involved wp-config.php and .htaccess files differently pre and post. I would check those files. consider that you have them set as pre, while CP sets them at post. this means either you bring them back to pre OR you correct all other settings that changed when the process was changed.
That is my best bet.
Aother thing is: a theme or plugin(s) might be causing this due to incompatibility.
One good way to trouble shoot is you going into wp-config.php and enabling the error logs so that in there you can see what is going wrong because without any real clue it is not really possible to understand what is wrong.

3

Hi,

Had something similar with an old multisite and the fix in this topic solved it.

4

I didn’t follow your first paragraph at all regarding setting files as pre or post (where is that set, for example), but I did enable logging by adding the following to wp-config.php based on https://www.wpallimport.com/wordpress-error-logs/:

define( ‘WP_DEBUG’, true );
define( ‘WP_DEBUG_LOG’, true );
define( ‘WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY’, false );

I’ve refreshed the blank home page a few times, including a ctrl-F5, and and there’s no error_log file at all.

So, still no clue.

5

Neither the fix on https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/60171/branches/6.8/src/wp-includes/ms-files.php nor the fix on (same site)/changeset/59967 helped – still a blank page. I’ll look into @ElisabettaCarrara’s suggestion next.

6

To be clear, you do have a working multisite, that has been updated to WP 6.9.4?
And that’s your starting point for the migration to CP?

If your multisite has the pre 3.5 structure, does it have the blogs.dir?
If it does, did you perhaps forget to copy that one to the CP install?

7

setting up a multisite is a two step process where you copy pieces of .htaccess and wp-config.php and paste them at their places as explained in the guided process in dashboard. This means that when setting this up BEFORE WP changed how it all worked those two files had a distinct structure after setting multisite up. That structure was changed together with files location and database tables if I am not mistaken at some point.
This means that if your install was using the old .htaccess and wp-config.php structure, migrating it could result in it being overwritten with the same configs in the modern form. This means that you have same configs yes, but files location and database might not match them because they still follow the old .htaccess and wp-config.php structure.
Basically as @Guido07111975 said you should have checked the files and checked db was ok and preserve the old .htaccess and wp-config.php to be sure to move everything smoothly.

8

My original post said that my existing multisite has been updated to WordPress 6.9.4, and that was my starting point.

I used the “Migrating to ClassicPress without using the plugin” option [https://docs.classicpress.net/user-guides/installing-classicpress/#migrating-to-classicpress-without-using-the-plugin] on a clone of my working WP site, so the blogs.dir directory was already there. It also means I didn’t copy the wp-config.php file (there wasn’t a htaccess file to copy so the original was unchanged).

I re-checked and the .htaccess and wp-config.php files are the same between the working WP site and the new CP one, with the obvious exception of the directory and database names and the following:

WP:
define(‘WP_DEBUG’, false);
define(‘WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY’, true);

CP:
define( ‘WP_DEBUG’, true );
define( ‘WP_DEBUG_LOG’, true );
define( ‘WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY’, false );

Oh, and still no error logs on the CP site.

So what I’m doing now is creating a new WP install and moving everything from the pre-3.5 site to the post-3.5 site, and then I’ll try cloning that new one and migrating the cloned site to CP and see if that works.

9

if you still need help at that point, just ask me. I’m in the ending stages of a WP Multisite migration.

Looks like the multisite feature hasnt seen much further development past its point of getting integrated into WP in version 4.5 or so. Thus, a lot of stuff feels very .. rudimentary.

cu, w0lf.