Boy Howdy! I’ve been having some fun here. My last post about changing the permission to allow an upgrade to 2.8.4 was the begining of the odyssey.  The automatic update indicated that it completed successfully however, when navigating to the site only blank pages would appear.

I tried looking into the wp-config.php and I could even pull up the readme.html from the update but no PHP pages. I tried renaming plugins and themes folders to see if i would work past this by avoiding a bug with the update.

The update did not overwrite any of the wp-content files so I had access to the themes, images and media from the original site.

I created another site with a spare domain in Plesk using the latest WordPress 2.8.4 and went through the process as though I was setting up a new WordPress install. I then took the database backup from the original site and imported that into the new site.

On this new site I was still only able to get blank pages. I had not moved my wp-content from the original site over to the new site yet. After doing this the site homepage would come up and the old site was replicated. However clicking on any link would lead to a blank page because I had not changed the setting of the new siter or turned off the old site from their domain pointers.

I suspened the original site pointed  the domain to the new sites IP and waiting for the change to propogate. After a couple hours I had restored my old site.

Warning: This is not for the faint of heart.

Update: I have run into this again updating 2.7 to 2.9 with the update function built into WordPress. Blank Pages the whole works. In doing a new reconstruction I had some problems with the data restore because of permissions and it would not allow me to create another instance of the database.