WP Engine sites crash when activating plugin

@welswebmaster we’ll need a lot more information than this in order to help.

There could be any number of reasons why things aren’t working.

WPGraphQL has changed significantly in the 2+ years between 0.0.23 and 1.3.8.

My first guess is that you might have code that was using some functions from WPGraphQL 0.2.3 and those functions have changed and no longer exist, so you might be getting some fatal errors, or something along those lines.

I would recommend using a tool like Local to set up your site locally and get things working there with current versions of plugins, then when ready, push up to WPEngine.

Using Local you can inspect the server error logs, etc and see what the issues with updating the plugin might be.

Thanks, Jason. One site is a fairly new install and has no functions.php extra code. It too crashed with the latest version. I’ll try brand new and start there. Thanks for the tips.

@welswebmaster what version of PHP are you on?

Possibly a PHP version issue?

Also, how are you installing the plugin? Are you installing from www.ads-software.com, cloning from Github, installing from Composer?

Maybe take a look at the Install instructions as things changed a bit after this plugin was made available on www.ads-software.com and composer dependencies are no longer versioned in Git.

Hey Jason,
We are running latest version of WordPress and PHP 7.4. I pulled the plugin from www.ads-software.com and updated from Dashboard > plugins. I’ve just deleted all of that.

@welswebmaster my local development environment is PHP 7.4.1 and we have tests run on each PR on PHP 7.4 to make sure things keep working in 7.4.

My guess is that there’s some sort of code conflict with a plugin or theme code.

I’d recommend digging in the server error logs and seeing if you can find any fatal errors and go from there.

@welswebmaster ok, hold on, I did some more digging and it looks like this issue was also reported on Github.

https://github.com/wp-graphql/wp-graphql/issues/1864

It appears to be a conflict with the Cloudinary plugin, and likely some other plugins. ??

Ya, I did look at the error log and saw this:

[Thu May 06 16:03:46.285265 2021] [php7:error] [pid 10922] [client 213.198.67.206:46622] PHP Fatal error: Uncaught TypeError: Argument 3 passed to WPGraphQL\\Utils\\Preview::filter_post_meta_for_previews() must be of the type string, null given, called in /nas/content/live/ficmag/wp-includes/class-wp-hook.php on line 294 and defined in /nas/content/live/ficmag/wp-content/plugins/wp-graphql/src/Utils/Preview.php:22\nStack trace:\n#0 /nas/content/live/ficmag/wp-includes/class-wp-hook.php(294): WPGraphQL\\Utils\\Preview::filter_post_meta_for_previews(NULL, 24496, NULL, true)\n#1 /nas/content/live/ficmag/wp-includes/plugin.php(212): WP_Hook->apply_filters(NULL, Array)\n#2 /nas/content/live/ficmag/wp-includes/meta.php(564): apply_filters('get_post_metada...', NULL, 24496, NULL, true, 'post')\n#3 /nas/content/live/ficmag/wp-includes/meta.php(506): get_metadata_raw('post', 24496, NULL, true)\n#4 /nas/content/live/ficmag/wp-includes/post.php(2226): get_metadata('post', 24496, NULL, true)\n#5 /nas/content/live/ficmag/wp-content/plugins/ocean-hooks/ocean-hooks.php(758): get_post_meta(24496, NULL, true)\n#6 /nas/content/live/ficmag/wp- in /nas/content/live/ficmag/wp-content/plugins/wp-graphql/src/Utils/Preview.php on line 22
[Thu May 06 16:04:13.882828 2021] [php7:notice] [pid 15639] [client 199.30.170.110:44304] auditor:event=deactivated_plugin {"plugin":"wp-graphql/wp-graphql.php","network_activation":false,"blog_id":1,"event":"deactivated_plugin","current_user_id":2,"remote_addr":"199.30.170.110"}, referer: <ACTUAL DOMAIN HERE>/wp-admin/plugins.php

I’ll reinstall on fresh install with WP theme no plugins. Kinda sux because we now reverted to Json just to get our mobile app up and running again.
Sidenote – These are the types of topics (workshops) that would be helpful to advanced WordPress admins. We aren’t full blown developers but are expected to use the latest tech for multiple sites for companies. Newbie sessions at Wordcamps are worthless to us as are plugin development. There are a ton of people using WP as a CMS or for their mobile app.

Ok, I think we have a lead to work on now that we know at least one specific plugin (Cloudinary) that causes the conflict.

We’ll try and reproduce today and see if we can get to the bottom of this and find a resolution.

Looking forward to it!

@welswebmaster We published a release yesterday that resolves this issue. Can you try the latest version of the plugin and report back?

@jasonbahl Will do. I will be a few weeks though. Thanks for this.

@welswebmaster I’m going to mark this as resolved. Please let us know if there are any other issues you’re having.

Yes please. Thanks for the fix!