Pro update caused ENTIRE SITE TO CRASH

[George]

Our restaurant site is entirely down after an attempted update of your plugin. Can’t get to the WordPress back end, nothing. It is Friday, our busiest day, so, needless to say, this is extremely time sensitive.

What is the solution? Deleting the plugin will mean deleting months of events, so I’d prefer not to do that right now. Help!

This is the error: Fatal error: Can’t use function return value in write context in /home/theo0315/public_html/cypressrestaurantnj.com/wp-content/plugins/events-calendar-pro/src/functions/template-tags/venue.php on line 97

[Zach Tirrell]

George,

This is a compatibility issue with PHP 5.2. While we do try to support old versions of PHP 5.2, because WordPress itself does, using out-of-date versions of software like this is bad for security and site performance. We will be shipping a hotfix for this as soon as possible.

You have two options for a temporary fix:

• You can head to line 97 of events-calendar-pro/src/functions/template-tags/venue.php from this:return ! empty( tribe_get_events( $args ) );

  to this:
  
$tribe_events = tribe_get_events( $args );
return ! empty( $tribe_events );

• Or you can delete The Events Calendar 4.3.1.1 and Events Calendar Pro 4.3.1 from your site and temporarily re-install versions 4.3 of both plugins until we release a fix for this issue—which we will do promptly and are working on as I type this response.

Thank you so much for your patience! Please let us know if you have further questions on this matter or anything else we can try to help with.

[George]

This is not working. That code is nowhere in that file and line 97 is blank. Here is a screenshot of what is on and near line 97. Please supply me with the right code to search for and replace it with.

Thanks.

[Zach Tirrell]

Hopefully I can spare you further code exploration. 🙂

The Events Calendar PRO 4.3.1.1 hotfix is now available and is targeted at exclusively fixing this bug. You can either auto-update to that version or grab it from the downloads in your account – https://theeventscalendar.com/my-account/downloads/

Let me know if you need any other assistance.

[George]

Zach, I cannot access the WordPress back end because this plugin is crashing the whole site. If I download this and overwrite the files through our FTP, does that mean I’ll lose all the event info that’s already there? Or can I pick and choose a folder so that this doesn’t happen?

If that’s the case, please send me the correct code instead of having me erase event info we’ve taken months to input.

Thanks.

[George]

Also, I tried just overwriting the venue file with the one in this new update, and that did not fix the problem.

Please advise.

Thanks.

[George]

Please, this has been down all day and it’s taking so long to get responses. Your proposed fix did not work and I want to be sure we’re not going to overwrite all our data by replacing the files at the FTP level. Can you please advise?

[Zach Tirrell]

If you replace the plugin files with the latest versions it will not impact your data, as that is stored in MySQL, but will fix the plugin code which is throwing the errors. You should make sure you have 4.3.1.1 of both The Events Calendar and Events Calendar PRO.

[Doug Rodgers]

Zach,

Thanks for the quick reply. Our entire site went down today also. Our hosting partner provided me with the following error message:

mod_fcgid: stderr: PHP Fatal error: Can’t use function return value in write context in /web/wp-content/plugins/events-calendar-pro/src/functions/template-tags/venue.php on line 97, referer: https://www.facebook.com/

George,

This is what we did. Our first work around was to use FTP to rename the “/web/wp-content/plugins/events-calendar-pro” directory to “/web/wp-content/plugins/events-calendar-pro.old”. Then we were able to get back into the WordPress admin site and Deactivate the Event Calendar Pro plug-in.

I just now overwrote the ..venue.php file from the hotfix download into the plugin folder, then renamed the directory back to original name, then used WordPress to Activate the plug-in. Everything seems to be working fine now.

I hope this helps.

Doug.

[Zach Tirrell]

Sounds like you made your 4.3.1 match our 4.3.1.1. 🙂 You can update to the official 4.3.1.1 release as it should match what you have other than the version number. If you prefer to wait, 4.3.2 will be coming in a couple weeks and you can just sit tight.

Sounds like you are in good shape now though, I’m going to go ahead and mark this resolved.

[Author]

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