goosus

Honestly, I am not a wordpress guru and like I said, I was doing this as a favor for a friend at the company.

I will pass along the recommendations, but as always, it’s a matter of budget for them I’m sure. I helped fix their problem now, but I’m not looking to mire myself again by attempting to upgrade their WP with this shoddy theme and unknown plugins.

Honestly, I may be recommending they move away from WP completely, as this theme is poorly implemented and if they’re changing the theme to a more robust one, may as well do the same with the platform.

As for helping on the WP forums, I feel like WP support requires such esoteric, non-PHP specific knowledge that I doubt I could contribute more than noise.

Anyways, thanks again for the help, I’ll pay it forward somehow I’m sure!

Ok, I have fixed the issue finally…

Turns out that I was on 3.6, not 3.6.1 (readme said one thing, version.php another?), so I uploaded that functions.php file back to wp-includes and everything is humming again.

Thanks a lot for all the support, informational and psychological, I was on the edge of insanity.

If either of you take bitcoin, shoot me an address and I’ll tip you some coin.

Praised Be!

On a hunch, I downloaded 3.6 (not 3.6.1) and re-uploaded the functions.php to the wp-includes and it finally came back

Ok, thanks guys, moving forward here… not sure if I should create a new post, but after restoring my functions.php (version 3.6.1), I now have a different fatal error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function wp_suspend_cache_addition() in /data/11/0/126/127/778290/user/796823/htdocs/wp-includes/cache.php on line 324

Should I make another post, or do you guys have some more insight?

Ok, looks like I found the problem:

<——- THIS GUY

I uploaded the functions.php for the theme in to the wp-includes and overwrote THAT functions.php file.

Now, like a semi-clever idiot, I’ve realized that I backed up the wp-content folder, but NOT the wp-includes folder.

Can anyone tell me how to figure out what version of WP I’ve got installed here (Admin is broken, remember) so I can find the right one to replace it with?

@esmi
I was already told they were incommunicado, which is why I was brought in the first place. So I’m operating on the assumption that he is dead or incapacitated. I can’t just change the theme because I’m pretty sure the page code is tightly coupled to this theme style, though I guess it’d be better than just white screen of death.

I can see how messing with the core javascript could break a theme, but the error I’m getting persistently is a PHP Fatal Error and that snippet was there and working fine before I did anything.

Does anyone have any insight in to how WordPress PHP actually operates? Is there some caching functionality of Theme code that updates when a change is made? Is there a compile step? Could the theme have gotten upgraded at some point, but then still semi-work until a theme file was changed?

I can speculate all day long, so I don’t need help in that, but what I really am looking for is someone with deeper understanding of the WP clockwork who can give me some definite knowledge to work with.

@esmi

I didn’t put there, there only piece of code that I have added (and them removed) is the 1 line between the comment. The theme originated here:

dressyourwp.com

From someone in Chile who I have yet to get in contact with.

I didn’t make the theme, I didn’t install it, I didn’t modify it or upgrade it. All I did was upload 1 file with 1 line change, then uploaded the same file again changing it back.

That was all it took to take me from “Oh yeah, I think I fix this little jquery issue you’re having” to “OH SHIT, what the hell is going on here??????”.

@mattbeck
Ok, but how could there be syntax errors when I literally added 1 line, then removed it? Unfortunately I don’t have command line access to the host and setting up a local dev environment it’s really practical given the size of the site and the massive differences between my local env and the production one.

@esmi
I didn’t de-register anything, I attempted to register the jquery-migrate plugin to make the other jquery plugins work again. I then removed that single line and found that it didn’t make a difference

Can anyone tell me how WP actually works when a file is changed in the theme? Does it compile something somewhere else? I can’t understand how simply updating a single line in a single file (after making 0 net changes) could break the entire site so completely and irreversibly?