I was testing with WordPress on a Cpanel server with PHP 7 provided by the CloudLinux PHP selector. Unfortunately, I ran in a blank screen of death while installing WordPress (blank screen wp-admin/setup-config.php?step=2). Fortunately, solving this problem is easy.
- Log in to Cpanel.
- Select PHP Version.
- Select the module mysqli.
- Click save.
This resolves the problem. WordPress tries to use mysql_connect if mysqli is not available. However, that function is dropped in PHP7 in favor of other – more safe – methods to handle database queries. If you have debugging enabled, you would have found something similar like this:
Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function mysql_connect() in /home/kickthis/public_html/wp-includes/wp-db.php:1520 Stack trace: #0 /home/kickthis/public_html/wp-includes/wp-db.php(658): wpdb->db_connect() #1 /home/kickthis/public_html/wp-includes/load.php(371): wpdb->__construct('kickthis_wp', 'xiTlz]d(A#9l', 'kickthis_wp', 'localhost') #2 /home/kickthis/public_html/wp-settings.php(88): require_wp_db() #3 /home/kickthis/public_html/wp-config.php(89): require_once('/home/kickthis/...') #4 /home/kickthis/public_html/wp-load.php(37): require_once('/home/kickthis/...') #5 /home/kickthis/public_html/wp-blog-header.php(13): require_once('/home/kickthis/...') #6 /home/kickthis/public_html/index.php(17): require('/home/kickthis/...') #7 {main} thrown in /home/kickthis/public_html/wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 1520