Creating Custom Category Causes Fatal Error

Hey Tim,

Sorry to hear! Do you happen to know what the fatal error message was?

@johnstonphilip, thanks for the reply. Here’s a screen recording of the steps: https://taricco.d.pr/v/Nncx4V. Whenever I create a custom category, this error happens. When I delete the newly created pattern PHP file from the patterns directory, the website returns online.

Thank you for sending those steps! My first thought is that this might be a plugin conflict, as we aren’t seeing any other reports of this. If you’re able to try it with all other plugins disabled, that would help us narrow this down.

If that doesn’t help, in order for WordPress to show the contents of that error (like the line number of the file causing the problem), you’d have to enable WP_DEBUG mode for your WordPress install. You can do this by manually editing the wp-config.php, and setting WP_DEBUG to “true”. Here’s a guide on that:

https://www.ads-software.com/documentation/article/debugging-in-wordpress/

@johnstonphilip, here’s what I have for you. I have deactivated ALL plugins except Pattern Manager. I’ve also cleared my child-theme functions.php of extra code. In debug mode, I get the error: Fatal error: Cannot use empty array elements in arrays in /nas/content/live/sbayfc/wp-content/themes/generatepress-child/patterns/my-new-pattern.php on line 14. This is a screenshot of the my-new-pattern.php file.

Thanks Tim,

It looks like this might be an actual bug in Pattern Manager for themes with no TextDomain. We’ll work on getting a fix out for this.

In the meantime, can you try adding a TextDomain to your theme’s style.css file?

To do this, open the style.css file, and in the theme header, add a TextDomain, something like this:

Text Domain: frost

Then try creating a pattern with a custom category again. I think that should fix this for you.

Thanks for all the helpful links and screenshots!

@johnstonphilip, excellent, that fixed my issue.