Testimonials Stopped Rotating

Hi Val,

I’m sorry to hear you’re experiencing these issues!

The symptoms you’re describing sound more like a plugin conflict than a connectivity or server issue, so if you’ve added or updated any plugins recently, I’d start my search with one of those as the culprit.

Let me take what you described and make some guesses as to what’s going on….

When I look at the HTML for your home page with the testimonials on it, it looks like the JavaScript for the testimonials plugin isn’t being loaded. Initially, the first testimonial loads with the page (it doesn’t need JavaScript to do that), then the JavaScript takes over to load different testimonials.

There are two causes I’ve frequently seen for scripts failing to load. First, another plugin has a bug that fouls up the script loading process for the rest of the plugins. Second, the theme template doesn’t include the wp_footer() function that inserts the script tags in the footer.

The fatal error you describe above would happen when the same php file — one with a class defined, like we have here — is called more than once on the same page load. My guess — and this is just a guess — is that there is a bug (probably introduced by a plugin) that caused the plugin page to fail to recognize that the testimonials plugin was activated.

If the testimonials plugin was deactivated, then that first testimonial would never show, so we can be fairly certain the plugin was active even though it showed as deactivated. If all of that were the case, I can see where running the Activation process on an already active plugin would throw that error.

The first solution I would try would be to search for plugin conflicts on a test (or local) instance of the site. If you’ve updated any plugins lately, try to deactivate them and see if the testimonials start working again. You should see the ivycat-testimonials-scripts.js file being loaded near the bottom of the HTML using a <script> tag.

If the activate/deactivate function isn’t working, you can try moving the plugin folder to another directory outside your WordPress installation. WordPress will probably complain and give you the option to deactivate the plugin, but it shouldn’t hurt your installation, and you can be certain the code isn’t being run.

I hope some of this helps! Let me know what you find, and we can take it from there.

Hi Patrick –

>another plugin has a bug that fouls up the script loading process for the rest of the plugins

that was the problem. I never changed anything. I don’t have any other plugins, except Akismet. But aweber recently changed their js script behind their subscribe form. When I disabled that js, the testimonials worked fine again.

It took me hours to troubleshoot a way around aweber’s junk. That mail service is getting worse and worse! I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone. Eventually I had to create multiple copies of the same subscribe box, a different one for each area of the page where it appears, and switch to using aweber’s longer js script, and now my ajax testimonials are working again.

So it was aweber that was stopping testimonials from loading.

P.S. the fact that it was the aewber subscribe form also explains why my testimonials stopped rotating on localhost too – because I had the form locally too, calling up the same js on the aweber server that my website does. It’s the javascript on the aweber server that’s such a mess and is fouling things up for everyone else.

Ah yes, another plugin conflict raises its ugly head. Those can be really tedious to troubleshoot.

Well, I’m glad to hear you got that sorted out, anyway, and thank you for posting your solution!