Published by Mijingo
movie icon image

EE Insider Blog

Spend your time learning and developing sites with ExpressionEngine and we'll use this blog to keep you informed of all the news related to ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter.

» Read more in the Archives.

» Have a tip? Send us your EE news.

Learn ExpressionEngine Today

Over a series of 8 videos, watch and learn as Ryan builds an entire ExpressionEngine website from beginning to end. Get started now.

Unable to Load Site Preferences Error

This isn’t a very helpful error when it comes up and it can throw off a lot of people. The first time I saw it, it made me scratch my head for a second.

The error is most likely caused by EE being unable to connect to your database server. Check your database hostname, username and password. It could also, however, be caused by something else (like a missing database table).

I’m unsure why a bad database connection doesn’t throw a database error first considering that is usually the underlying problem.

I was reminded of this by this tweet:

Posted on Jun 27, 2012 by Ryan Irelan

Filed Under: ExpressionEngine 2

Jason — 15:30 on 06.28.2012

Wasn’t expecting to see my name on EE Insider…

The issue was indeed a DB connection problem.
Moving to a production server, my DB hostname was set to localhost, which in this case was incorrect.

Dan — 13:16 on 12.25.2014

someone please talk to me like i’m an idiot