Two Installations, Two Upgrades, Two Results…

@ Trickshot699

Is the theme by chance on based on the Cherry Framework? I ask because older version of themes based on this framework has a bug. More Can be read about here:

https://connections-pro.com/faqs/cherryframework-based-themes/

I know you said both sites are using the same theme, but are they running the same version?

Another possibility, the theme has some code that is only run when running on a multisite install of WP.

At any rate the cause would be the same… something in the theme is incorrectly using the WP $wp_query global var.

To quickly debug this, I suggest downloading all the theme files to your desktop and use Sublime Text (or your favorite editor) and do a search across all theme files for instances of $wp_query and check each one to see if the theme author is unsetting, setting to NULL or doing anything else other than reading from it.

Hope that helps. Let me know what you find out.

Hi,

They both use the Magnium Theme (not magnum). They both have the same version. I actually cloned the production environment to create staging. So I know that the versions are the same.

I did the search and found nothing in the theme files. Is there something specific or a specific set of steps I need to do in a particular order to enable Connections on multisite? Would it be useful to uninstall it, delete all the files then reinstall it on the WP network? Should I network enable?

I fear I must have screwed up the Connections stuff when I switched to multisite (since it was installed prior to multisite being active)

Thanks for your patience!

@ Trickshot699

What about plugin versions, are they all the same too? I just noticed that it appears Yoast SEO had an update and they are dealing with tracking down the same error … users are getting it after updating to the new version. More here. Maybe there is a relation?

Did you install Connections on a single site install of WP and then convert that install to a multisite install? If you did, did you have data in Connections before the switch? Just making sure my reading comprehension is not failing me ??

Can this mess up Connections? Yes, possible but not that type of error. What could happen is you “lose” you data and images (they are not actually lost). If you did not, then your are good in that regard. If you did “lose” your data, then you need to put Connections into single site mode even though you are in multisite. What this means is ever subsite will use the data, basically a “shared” db.

As for activating Connections, this should be done on a site to site basis, not network activated. The primary reason being is the network activation will not create the necessary tables in each subsite.

Since this error is on a staging site, I’d be willing to take a closer look if you’d like to share. Just contact me here.

Well. That seemed to be sort of related

1) Both sites were running the “pre-patch” version of Yoast that some people called out as creating the wp_query issue. But the production (single site) was running without issue. The staging (multi-site) failed the upgrade of Connections as I mentioned

2) I updated Yoast on both sites. Production continued to run. When I then enabled Connections (not network activate, just single site) on the staging environment I got a white screen. But I flushed the WP cache out of habit and the site came up with Connections running.

3) I am at a loss as to what the white screen was about, as the error log and php logs were empty. But it appears to be running OK now.

I will keep an eye on it as we build out the staging environment and will not hesitate to come back to you with credentials if you need to have a look.

Thanks!

@ Trickshot699

Yeah, seems the Yoast SEO bug was somehow related… but that white screen activation still has me wondering since there was not an error in the PHP error log. My experience that only really happens when memory allocated to PHP is exhausted (assuming you are logging all error levels). Do you know what your memory limit is set to and how much memory a page load is taking (on average).

I know, I was thinking that too. But P3 indicates fast page loads and the memory is not saturated (our cpanel says 76% was the highest level in the last 10 days.) But anything is possible.

I’ll review it in a few days

R