Polylang Fatal Error since 09/01/23

Hello,
It seems that I haven’t been clear enough, so I’ll try to be clearer.

– This bug doesn’t exist in v3.3.1 when it’s properly installed. I am 200% sure of that because the error occurs in a file that doesn’t exist in this version. You can donwload the zip and manually check the files. You’ll see that there is no more ‘lingotek’ folder. This is also visible in the source of this version hosted here: https://plugins.trac.www.ads-software.com/browser/polylang/tags/3.3.1

– This bug is the result of something having gone wrong during the update process. Normally WordPress completely removes all the plugin files. In your case, files from the old version are mixed with files from the new version. That’s why the plugin doesn’t work as expected.

– This bug is related to the plugin update and it is out of the plugin author control. Deactivate old plugin, remove old plugin, download new plugin, unzip files, activate new plugin, all these actions are 100% handled by WordPress, not by the plugin itself.

– I have no idea why the part of the process “remove old plugin” failed in your case. This is something I never encountered myself.

– So I hope you understand now that there will be no fix in the future because this is not a bug in Polylang.

– If you have such issue, the best to do is to manually remove the complete polylang directory and to re-install the latest version (currently 3.3.1) from the WordPress dashboard as you did the first time. This way you are sure that you’ll get Polylang properly installed without versions mix.

– There is no risk for your data in removing plugin files and re-install the new version. Remember, this is exactly what should have been done by the update process. All your data are stored in the database (that said, the best practice that I would always recommend is to do a backup before any WordPress, plugin or theme update).

Having the same problem as of today.

I’ve been informed by WordPress about a critical error on my website.

Website admin page was unavailable until disabling the Polylang plugin in recovery mode.

The culprit: Polylang plugin 3.3.1

PHP version 7.4.33.

Thank you @chouby for confirming that the data is stored somewhere else and that removing+reinstalling the plugin doesn’t make us lose all our settings.

As I wrote in a previous reply, removing completely the plugin and reinstalling it with the 3.3.1 zip file worked for me, so I will mark this as “resolved”.

Thank you again @chouby!

same problem, the plugin broke my website.

Just adding my “me too”. As with the others, I did not do anything special – the automatic update apparently doesn’t work right. You say that the update process is not under the control of Polylang, but obviously some code somewhere (in Polylang or WordPress) doesn’t have a correct list of what files to delete, add, and replace for the upgrade to 3.3.1. I’ll try the remove and replace method mentioned earlier, but you should expect many more complaints about this before we are all out of the woods, and it’s possible that future updates could have similar issues.

@patmasayuki
As Polylang changelog says
https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/polylang/#developers

3.3.1 version mainly fixes Polylang Pro issues and some conflicts with other plugins (Sendinblue for WooCommerce and WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate).

It has no effects on translations.
So you can permanently delete your “polylang.old” folder.

Regards

• This reply was modified 1 year, 10 months ago by Emmanuel Hesry.

I’m also wondering if you could confirm that we can permanently erase the older folder “polylang.old” without losing all translations ?

• This reply was modified 1 year, 10 months ago by aliceplt.

You say that the update process is not under the control of Polylang, but obviously some code somewhere (in Polylang or WordPress) doesn’t have a correct list of what files to delete, add, and replace for the upgrade to 3.3.1. I’ll try the remove and replace method mentioned earlier, but you should expect many more complaints about this before we are all out of the woods, and it’s possible that future updates could have similar issues.

WordPress deletes the complete “plugins/polylang” folder. It doesn’t need to know which files are included in this folder.

I am surprised by the number of people having this issue. This is very frustrating for us because we don’t know why the files deletion fails and thus we are unsure on how to protect you against this in the future.

I guess however that a fatal error won’t happen at every update. This version was special because we removed the advertisement for Lingotek.

@patmasayuki @markusmai @jbesa @siwhyatt @herbyltd @coragi @ambroz @detailscloud @osakawebbie

Given the number of users having encountered this issue I have opened a ticket https://core.trac.www.ads-software.com/ticket/57500

To go forward we need to reproduce the issue and so we are looking for more information about your install. Maybe we’ll find some common points between them.

• Does your site health status report any issue? See Tools > Site Health
• Could you provide a list of your plugins? Or even better could you share site health info in See Tools > Site Health > Info > Copy site info to clipboard?

You can share it privately with me using https://kdrive.infomaniak.com/app/collaborate/336014/4fcfaffe-ee54-4295-ad0a-d774b98bb424

Okay, I shared my Site Health Info. I renamed the Polylang folder before uploading a fresh folder of files (and haven’t deleted the renamed inactive one yet), so the Site Health Info’s list of plugins shows an active Polylang and an inactive Polylang – don’t let that confuse you.

@patmasayuki Thank you so much for your explanation step by step! It solved my issue too. Should we delete the polylang.old file afterwards so that we don’t see double Polylang (active and inactive) in the plugins?

Same problem with 2 sites updating in automatic. Downgraded to 3.3. Hope the next version will fix this bug. Thanks

Thank you @osakawebbie . It will help if other users share the same information.

@chouby A bit late maybe, but I just sent you a copy of the site health info. It’s a dev site currently under construction hence all the deactivated plugins, though has good health and no other issues aside from the critical error caused by the update.

Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Class ‘PLL_Lingotek’ not found in D:\Xampp\htdocs\sawtrust-wp\wp-content\plugins\polylang\modules\lingotek\load.php:13