WordPress can be one of the easiest content management systems to publish a blog or website on. It can also be one of the most frustrating. Out of the box WordPress is pretty stable, start adding plugins and customizing it and conflicts with plugins and hosting account settings can drive a blogger mad!

One such issue I came across recently on WordPress version 2.5 is a memory limit on a hosting account. This was causing the Google XML Sitemaps plugin to create issues when publishing a new post or saving changes to an existing post. Mike from Total Marketing Toolbox contacted me with this problem and I was able to track it down for him.

The problem was when a WordPress post was published or saved, in a Firefox browser the page would just go blank, or in Internet Explorer an error message can up ‘page could not be displayed’. It took some digging around but I figured it had something to do with a plugin. So first I deactivated all plugins and tried to recreate the issue after activating one plugin at a time. After isolating the plugin I checked the settings on it and got lucky. It told me that the sitemap could not be written and that I should check the servers memory limit. The plugins configuration page also has a setting to increase the memory limit. It was an easy fix to raise the memory limit and get the WordPress blog back in business.

If you encounter similar issues when publishing a new post first look at plugins that perform a function when publishing a post, like Google Sitemaps, or Smart Update Pinger.

Thanks to Arne Brachhold for writing such a great plugin, Google XML Sitemaps, and making it easy for us to track down and fix these little issues.

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Filed In: WordPress Guide //