Redchrome

Thanks esmi.

In the end after some discussion with the customer, they decided to go with a simple Dreamweaver-designed website rather than a WordPress blog. This will be a lot easier to operate given the available skill levels at the moment. I am not an experienced WordPress admin, nor is anyone on the customer’s side; nor is that likely to change. I am encouraging them to find an experienced WordPress developer/admin if they really want to go forward with WordPress. Someone who will manage patching WordPress (since it doesn’t seem easy to do with Debian/Ubuntu packages) as well as developing the site for it.

I would update to the newest version, if there was a package for it. Ideally, a package produced by someone who puts it in a repository and will update it if a security patch comes out.

I don’t want to install from a tarball. Installing from a tarball means that it’s up to me to:
a) remember that I have wordpress installed on one of 200 servers
b) watch for security updates to wordpress
c) download, install, test, hope nothing breaks with the change from the last version. Ideally I should have a test site to do this on; but of course the customer will never pay for that.

If I use a software package supported by the distribution, I can patch 16 hosts simultaneously, and several other packages at the same time, and it only takes 5 minutes.

I appreciate where people are coming from as developers; but this is my life as an administrator. 🙁

Thanks alexvorn2.
Since I’m running an Ubuntu box I read the Debian-specific WordPress doco and added your suggested directive to /etc/wordpress/config-<sitename>.php

After turning on debugging in the way you suggested; I get the following error when I try to preview the theme.

Fatal error: Uncaught exception ‘Exception’ with message ‘template hasn’t been set yet with ::keep()’ in /usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/themes/annotum-base/functions/Anno_Keeper.php:19 Stack trace: #0 /usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/themes/annotum-base/functions/template.php(649): Anno_Keeper::retrieve(‘template’) #1 /usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/themes/annotum-base/header/header-default.php(16): anno_open_html() #2 /usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/themes/annotum-base/carrington-core/utility.php(325): include(‘/usr/share/word…’) #3 /usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/themes/annotum-base/carrington-core/templates.php(39): cfct_template_file(‘header’, ‘/usr/share/word…’) #4 /usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/themes/annotum-base/header.php(16): cfct_header() #5 /usr/share/wordpress/wp-includes/theme.php(996): require_once(‘/usr/share/word…’) #6 /usr/share/wordpress/wp-includes/theme.php(974): load_template(‘/usr/share/word…’) #7 /usr/share/wordpress/wp-includes/general-template.php(34): locate_template(Array, true) #8 /us in /usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/themes/annotum-base/functions/Anno_Keeper.php on line 19

Unfortunately, a google search for template hasn't been set yet with ::keep() does not yield any useful hints. At least none in simple enough language for my limited wordpress skills to understand.

Any suggestions for what to try next?

AFAIK this *was* all working before, so I don’t think the WordPress version is at fault. (Are there any WordPress 3.4.2 packages backported to Ubuntu Lucid? I would rather not be my own package maintainer and installing software without a maintained package is a poor idea unless you avidly follow that software’s development.)