Theme directory “twentyfifteen” does not exist

WOW, that was scary! I just went into my WP-ADMIN to update some Plugins and the theme [I heard there was an update @ 4.2.2], and I ended up losing my site: we are talking full on, white page, so a screen shot would not really do justice to how scary that is. There was no error code or message in site. Is this a “White Screen of Death”? I had the 2014 WordPress theme installed, nothing more except a few plugins. I did notice before trying to update WP 2014 that 2015 was sitting there unused, and I checked the box. Big mistake [?]. I guess I really should have simply removed 2015 altogether until I was ready to move to it or not checked the box. But shouldn’t we be able to update both the 2014 AND 2015 theme, without taking the site down? Lesson learned!

I also ended up with this rather ugly message in the Themes WP-Admin area upon finishing the themes updates:

“theme directory “twentyfifteen” does not exist”

Yikes! Site down, and limited options! Did I mention I am NOT USING 2015. I guess by checking both boxes, the assumption by the application is I wanted to upgrade to 2015.

I panicked and started searching frantically over at my friend, the Google search engine. Unfortunately, none of the fixes applied to my situation and some did not work for me. The fix was surprisingly easy, but I admit I ‘rolled the dice’ on it, as I was not sure if I would lose my site for good, or at least until a full reinstall. [I DID have some backups of the content].

I was still able to get into my http:// sitename/wp-admin so at least I had that going for me. Gratitude! I went into the Appearance and themes area, which is where the ugly message was showing and I added the 2014 theme back. I reinstalled it. This all happened so fast, I had to do it twice – sorry but I am not sure why this was necessary, but the WP 2014 site indeed came back!