Tabs stopped working after WP 4.5.2 update

Check whether the tabs appear correctly if you use temporarily switch to a different theme. If so this indicates a theme issue.

If it is no different, check after temporarily deactivating all other plugins. If the tabs appear correctly with no other plugins active, this would normally indicate an issue with one of your other plugins preventing the tabby js from having an effect. In this case activate the plugins one by one and check the tabs to discover which plugin causes the issue.

Thanks for the quick response but I would have done that already if this would be impossible. Unfortunately, I use many plugins and several are just essential to basic site working and rendering so I can’t deactivate them and see what happens.

Any other idea?

Thanks,
Yves.

I am suggesting a temporary troubleshooting step – not to deactivate the plugins and keep them deactivated. If you don’t know what is causing the problem, you don’t know what to look at closer for a workaround or fix.

If your site cannot have plugins deactivated for a few minutes whilst troubleshooting you should set up a clone of the site either locally or at another URL and troubleshoot the issue on that.

Just to complement my response: the problem persists when I activate only the 7 plugins (including Tabby) necessary to ensure a minimal site rendering, that are:

• Buddypress
• ezPHP
• Formidable
• Get custom Fields Values
• Groups
• Polylang
• Tabby Responsive Tabs

All these plugins are up to date and reputed working with WP 4.5.2.

Hence my question in this forum, to seek new ideas and advices on this tabs issue…

Thanks,
Yves.

The link you have given is a WP Engine staging site not a live production site. Unless I have a flawed understanding of how WP engine enables staging sites, troubleshooting on this site would not affect the production site and the staging site can easily be returned to its current state after testing in case of problems.

Thanks a lot again for the advices. I was not clear enough: if I deactivate the 6 essentials plugins mentioned above, I just can’t see anything, except messages like “Fatal error:…” since there are calls to functions specific to these plugins to display the pages where I can see tabby working or not.

That is the point. You’re right that it is a staging site and not a production site, that’s why I was able to temporarily deactivate all plugins but these 7 ones without causing losses to my regular site users.

I understand that you keep thinking that the problem in the tabs display is caused by a conflict with one of the 6 other plugins I can’t deactivate. But then, why would it work perfectly with WP 4.4.3 and not with WP 4.5.2? Wouldn’t the conflict occur anyway?

Thanks again for the time you spend on this issue!
Yves.

Oh – I see.

It sounds like this page using a specific page template that requires the plugin functions. If this is the case I would normally expect to see calls to plugin functions wrapped in an if( function_exists() so they can fail gracefully (perhaps with fallback default content in an else) if the plugin isn’t active.

Are you using the tab shortcodes in the page content or are the tabs added in the page template’s code?

Is it possible to troubleshoot with the page template taken out of the equation – ie setting up a new tab page with with the tab shortcodes with the page using the default page template?

Yes. I wanted to avoid building a new page just for testing but it seems the only solution left and finally the less expensive. This is the price to pay since I should have wrapped all plugin calls in conditional statements as you suggest but I decided not to do so for performance reasons.

I will do that and let you know, thanks again.
Yves.

Hi there,

OK, I have created a very simple page and deactivated all plugins but Tabby. As you can see, it still doesn’t work.

Could you see what happens? How could I investigate further?

Thanks in advance,
Yves.

The next thing to investigate is whether the theme is causing this issue. To do this switch to a default theme such as twenty-sixteen to see whether the tabs display then.

Yes, I already did that, and sure tabby works with twenty-sixteen on WP 4.5.2, as you know.

As I said earlier, I use a child theme of DIVI 2.7.5. And the test page also works with DIVI 2.7.5 but not with my child theme. So the question is: how could I investigate further on the issue with my child theme? What could I check, do you have an idea of what could be wrong?

Tip: my child theme works properly with Tabby, DIVI 2.7.5 and WP 4.4.3 (this is the working configuration on my production site).

Thanks for your active support, I really appreciate it!
Yves.

so the tabs display for you with:
WP 4.5.2 + Twenty sixteen & no plugins
WP 4.5.2 + Divi & no plugins

but do not display with:
WP 4.5.2 + Divi + your child theme & no plugins

As divi is a commercial theme I have no access to it, and I also don’t know anything about your child theme, so this is not easy to troubleshoot from this end.

Is your child theme adding any .js files or inline javascript? If so, it is likely that one of these scripts has an issue and you may be able to isolate the issue by removing these one-by-one until the issue does not occur then you will know which script needs to be looked at closer.

OK, I understand. I have a few js lines since I am really not an expert but there are some. I will do what you suggest and let you know.

Thanks!
Yves.

Success! I was actually including several lines of js code that was inspired by a previous version of the DIVI theme, and this code was wrong. Updating the lines has corrected everything.

Thank you again for your great and active support!

Cheers,
Yves.

This is good news – troubleshooting can be a long process, but you got there in the end.