WSOD Installing Drupal With Poorly Written Modules

A recent routine Drupal installation revealed a terrible bug that's easy to fix but takes hours to pinpoint. Recently what should have been a 10 minute install turned into a 4 hour job.

The complications arose while installing a fresh instance of Drupal into a multi site configuration. Drupal.org advices that contributed modules may possibly prevent a successful install.

The bug occurs immediately after the language selection process during install. The user is left with what is known as "White Screen Of Death" ( WSOD ). The screen is completely blank and upon inspection of the source it is blank as well. Typically there are no web server errors, php, or mysql errors logged.

It is noted however that an existing site will exhibit no signs of trouble what so ever. Unless you know this bug exists it's quite possible to trouble shoot everything and still end up unable to complete the install.

Working Solutions

1. Rename module directory if located in /sites/all path
2. Save modules to site specific modules directories and not /sites/all
3. Configure a Drupal base with no modules make installs there then move the site to the existing multi-site configuration with existing modules intact

Another solution which seems logical is to utilize an Apache Alias directive in the virtualhost configuration, remapping the location of the modules directory to something benign. For some reason Drupal still failed when this method was attempted.