Trying to activate Community Events plugin takes down website

[bullshoalslakeview]

After updating plugins on our WordPress site last week, we got a Server Down error. After several attempts to re-activate it, it was determined that the issue lies with the Community Events plugin itself. We have not been able to use this paid option for over a week now.

[George]

Hey @Bullshoalslakeview,

I’m really sorry to hear about this!

This is not normal behavior and there are currently no known fatal errors like this within the plugin code, so I’m wondering if there’s a specific code conflict on your site.

To help investigate this, can you share your “System Information” with us? Here’s how to do that → https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/sharing-sys-info/

Next, did you get actual “error” text on your screen when you activated this? Like “PHP Fatal Error: …”, where the “…” was a file name or something similar? If so, can you reproduce this error and then copy and paste the full text of it into a reply here? Or was the error just that your site became a blank white screen?

Thank you!
George

[bullshoalslakeview]

Hi George!
When the problem originally happened, I had just updated all the plugins that needed updating, and there was a white screen with a string of text.
However, the two times since then that I’ve tried to activate the Community Event plugin, I get a light blue screen with the words “Server Error” and the number “500” off to the side.
At that point, I cannot log out of WordPress or go to another option (such as pages, posts, etc.). I get the same Server Error screen and have to use the back arrow to get back to where I was.

I will try to share our system information with you. I’m green at all this technology stuff, so hopefully I can accomplish this.
Thanks for your help!

[bullshoalslakeview]

This reply is private.

[bullshoalslakeview]

I forgot to mention that if I click on “Add an Event” on Google Chrome, it says “Page not found”, but if I use Internet Explorer and click on “Add an Event”, it takes me to AVG Search bar.

[George]

Thank you for this information. I have a few specific steps that I would recommend from here:

1. Community Events is not showing up in the “plugins” list in your system information. This would mean it is not installed on your site. Did you remove Community Events because of the issues it seems to have caused?

2. I would recommend that you install Community Events on your site anew. Then, head to your site’s wp-config.php file and change this line of code:

define('WP_DEBUG', false);

to this:

define('WP_DEBUG', true);

Once you edit wp-config.php, try activating the Community Events plugin. There should be error text on the white screen when your site crashes – if so, please share this entire message here with us.

3. If after step #2 there is still no error text showing up, and just a blank white screen, then what I would recommend is contacting your web host about this issue. You describe getting a different kind of 500 server error than what our plugin would normally cause; there are no reports of this from other users; and I cannot recreate this issue at all 🙁 So if step #2 reveals no error text, then contact your web host and explain this issue in detail. See if they can investigate server logs, or if they can see the specific error responsible for the server crash.

Thank you!
George

[bullshoalslakeview]

Two questions:

The Community Events IS listed under my installed plugins, with the choices of ACTIVATE, EDIT, DELETE. Should I delete it and then select it again? I don’t want to select activate, because that choice doesn’t work in my case.

Where do I find the wp-config.php file? I DID look, but as I mentioned before, I’m pretty dumb about this stuff.

Thanks!

[George]

Hey @bullshoalslakeview,

I’m glad the plugin installed – apologies for my saying it wasn’t, the issue must’ve just been that our own “System information” module didn’t pick it up for some reason.

1. What version of Community Events is installed on your site?

2. Choosing “Activate” does break your site. However, this is valuable – I would recommend clicking “Activate” to break your site. See if any specific Error notices are displayed when your site breaks, and share them verbatim here if so.

3. As for wp-config.php, you would have to edit this file over FTP. The file is in the root directory of your WordPress installation. If this sort of file change is not something you know how to do right now, then no worries – do not make this file change. We can just ignore that step for now.

4. You said in your first post “it was determined that the issue lies with the Community Events plugin itself.” – how specifically was this determined, and what evidence was used to determine this?

Let me know what you find for items #1 and #2, and #4 here. Thank you so much for your patience!

— George

[bullshoalslakeview]

1. Version 3.12.1. It was installed over a year ago. This problem began when I updated all my plug-ins that needed to be updated, about a week ago.

2. I will do this tonight and let you know.

3. Thanks!

4. The last time I live-chatted with Blue Host (that’s how I get my site going again, with their help), they told me it was an issue with the plug-in and to contact you guys.

Thanks, George.

[George]

Thanks for this information!

3.12.1 is quite outdated, so I would recommend trying to get that up-to-date before doing much else. To be sure that the update is accurate, I would recommend deleting – not just “deactivating”, but deleting – Community Events from your wp-admin’s Plugins page.

This will not erase any event or website content or data, it will only erase the 3.12.1 Community Events files which is the goal.

Once deleted, install latest version of Community Events on your site and try activating it.

You can get the latest files from http://theeventscalendar.com/my-account/downloads

The latest version at the time of my writing this is 4.0.5. Install and activate this after deleting the old code, and see if anything improves! 🙂

Thanks for your patience with this.

Sincerely,
George

[bullshoalslakeview]

Sorry I didn’t break down the site when I said I was going to. BUT, I did find the original error message I got when I updated all the plugins. If I wrote it all down right, here it is (from January 18th):

Fatal Error – cannot redeclare tribe_is_community_my_events_ page previously declared in /home2/ bullshoa/public.html

And thanks for your latest advice. I guess it hadn’t been updated for a while, because it never said that it was 100% compatible with our version of WP, so I was nervous to update it.

I will work on this this weekend. Thanks so much, George!
–Ginger

[George]

Thank you for sharing that error message! That reveals the cause of the problem – which, I’m afraid to admit, is from a mistake we made last week when we launched the 4.0.5 update for The Events Calendar itself.

The short of what happened is that late on Thursday night, we uncovered a pretty important security hole in our plugin. We were tight on developers, and even the next day many were out on Friday and the weekend was fast-approaching…

So we were a bit frantic in trying to fix that security hole and to publish the fix in the 4.0.5 update.

We did fix the security flaw; but the first version of the files that we published for 4.0.5 had an error which leads to that error message you posted!

To ensure this does not happen, I would recommend doing the “Clean install” process for BOTH The Events Calendar itself, and then The Events Calendar: Community Events.

I’m sorry about this extra step; but it should resolve those errors completely and leave your site up-to-date with this software.

I Thanks for your patience here – keep me posted on your progress and if there’s anything else I can help with along the way.

Happy Friday,
George

[bullshoalslakeview]

Would you mind giving me a brief explanation of how to do the clean install?

[George]

Sorry for not elaborating; the process is simple though! It literally means that, for example, to “clean install” The Events Calendar you would delete the existing version of The Events Calendar on your site. Not just deactivate, but delete.

Then, you would download a fresh copy of the files for that plugin, and install these new files on your site in place of the old, just-deleted version.

Now, deleting The Events Calendar or other event add-on plugins will not delete any site or event data; however, backing up your site before this process is still recommended, and I would not recommend doing the process without backing up your site. If you choose to do so, you are doing so at your own risk and against our recommendation.

If you’re not sure how to back up your site, then now is a great time to learn! 🙂 It’s an essential skill and you should be backing things up regularly–apologies to belabor this point if you’re already doing frequent backups. If not, though, I would recommend simply Googling “how to backup my wordpress site”–I recommend this because there are a ton of different ways and methods for backing up your site, and so you can just search a bit and find the best method for you. There are even some plugins that make it as simple as clicking a few buttons to backup your database, for example–it’s awesome.

I hope this helps!
George

[bullshoalslakeview]

I believe we’ve got it, by George! 🙂

I did as you said, and the Community Events part seems to be working OK.

I appreciate all your help and extra explanations. I’ve learned a lot these past couple of weeks.

Again, thanks, George.

Sincerely, Ginger

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