Genesis Translations not compatible with PHP 8.0 and above

I’m opening this thread for anyone else who is troubleshooting their WordPress site when trying to switch from PHP 7.4 to PHP 8.0 or 8.2, and their site becomes unresponsive.

I have had this plugin up on one of our Genesis sites, not realising that it has been closed in 2020 and its last tested WordPress version was 5.3.15.

Which doesn’t make it surprising that it’s not actually compatible with PHP 8.0. After a long haul of turning all our plugins off and on again one by one and monitoring effects, it seems that under PHP 8.0 the plugin throws the following error:

Fatal error: Uncaught ValueError: version_compare(): Argument #3 ($operator) must be a valid comparison operator in [site]\wp-content\plugins\genesis-translations\genesis-translations.php:96 Stack trace:
#0 [site]\wp-content\plugins\genesis-translations\genesis-translations.php(96): version_compare(‘3.4.0’, ‘1.9.1’, ‘=<‘)
#1 [site]\wp-includes\class-wp-hook.php(310): thememix_genesis_translation_init(”)
#2 [site]\wp-includes\class-wp-hook.php(334): WP_Hook->apply_filters(”, Array)
#3 [site]\wp-includes\plugin.php(517): WP_Hook->do_action(Array)
#4 [site]\wp-content\themes\genesis\lib\init.php(462): do_action(‘genesis_init’)
#5 [site]\wp-content\themes\Hello Sassafras\functions.php(11): require_once(‘…’)
#6 [site]\wp-settings.php(600): include(‘…’)
#7 [site]\wp-config.php(103): require_once(‘…’)
#8 [site]\wp-load.php(50): require_once(‘…’)
#9 [site]\wp-admin\admin.php(34): require_once(‘…’)
#10 [site]\wp-admin\plugins.php(10): require_once(‘…’)
#11 {main} thrown in
[site]\wp-content\plugins\genesis-translations\genesis-translations.php on line 96

Hope this helps others down the line who are troubleshooting a PHP upgrade.

Adam