Issue with upgrade from 1.10.5 to 2.0.6

I just finished adding some events to my calendar, and saw that an upgrade to 2.0.6 was available. I upgraded and the plugin deactivated.

When I try to reactivate I get the following error message:

Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.

I’m really sad, because it’s late Friday afternoon and my site has no calendar once more.

Please help.

@facc same with me.. terrible.

Facc: If you get a fatal error, try turning on debug in Ai1ec.

Note: Debug will slow things down, and display a lot of messages that would be useless for a working install, so remember to turn it off afterwards.

To enable Ai1ec’s debug:

Edit …../all-in-one-event-calendar/app/config/constants.php

Near the end of the file, you will see this line:

define( 'AI1EC_DEBUG', false );

Change it to:

define( 'AI1EC_DEBUG', true );

Try again and report any errors if you don’t understand what they are and/or can’t fix the issues you get.

cefair: Thanks for your help. Unfortunately, it has given me lots of code which makes no sense to me. And when I say lots, it goes on for pages.

I’m basically fed up with really this product. Last month I had 2 errors. The first time I had to pay to get my calendar rebuilt. The second time one of the plugin developers helped me out with a fix. And now another problem. It’s disgraceful.

I think the solution is to look for an alternative plugin and then rebuild from scratch. Any reason why I should persevere?

Also, I am embarrassed to have recommended this product to 2 developers. Every time I have a problem with it I need to send a warning out to them.

I don’t know about your use case, but for me it works and I’ve not had any huge issues. I’m not a Time.ly developer, and while I throw them any bugs I find (with fixes if possible) I don’t know every in and out of the core code.

I do openly admit I’m not the standard user, and I’m willing to dig into issues to try and solve them. I also run a test setup, which is pretty much an exact duplicate of the main site I’m worried about (restored from a file/DB backup, with a few options changed to make it work on the test site – mainly the WP site URL, etc), and I test everything I deploy/change on the test site. I’ve had too many issues with various WP updates, themes and plugins (and no, not specifically ai1ec) to trust any plugin or update to just work.

I also keep rolling backups that get done automatically every 6 hrs, which then get copied off-site. In case something goes wrong I have multiple copies I can access. This is stuff I implemented after the webhost we were using had a catastrophic disk failure on their server, couldn’t restore it from a backup (they were all corrupted) and we lost pretty much everything. So as you can guess, I don’t solely trust webhost backups either.

Ai1ec is quite complex. WP itself is ~6MB zipped, and Ai1ec is ~2.5 MB zipped. It’s not exactly a small amount of code. There are bound to be bugs, especially with such a lot of newly changed code, as the 2.0 rewrite changed pretty much everything about how the plugin worked.

I’m not saying to excuse the issues, but having been involved a lot in development, I know how things like this happen, and just how hard it is to get code as bug free as possible. Especially when you have to co-exist with a huge amount of other code that may or may not be behaving as expected.

I used BackDraft Plus to backup to 1.10.05, and then upgraded to 2.0.6 again.

All now seems to be working. So I am still at a loss why there was a problem.

Thanks cefiar for your encouragement. You reminded me that I had backups, but I am now doing them far more regularly.

Problem resolved. Case closed.