The wordpressian version of the good old “To be, or not to be” Shakespeare-ean quote.
Yesterday one of my blogs had the usual “WordPress 3.2 is available! Please update now.” message on the yellow ribbon. I was just building that blog, and was like, what the hack, I will just update it and see what will happen… Well it went a little bit wrong for me.
Because that blog is heavily relying on Feedwordpress, a great feed syndication plugin, that is an absolute must for that site to be alive at all. After the update Feedwordpress stopped working and gave me this error:
“PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined method WP_SimplePie_File::WP_SimplePie_File() ….”
Because I had no time for this, I simply decided to copy wordpress 3.1.4 files over and let the site like that until “further notice”.
Today I had a little time on my hand and was able to find a not so elegant solution for the moment. It was not really a rocket science to find the answer, but I was not looking the right place at the beginning. I found the FeedWordPress 2011.0602: More compatibility fixes, fewer duplicated posts and in the comment section there is a short and sweet fix for the issue.
“Thank you for the heads-up on this issue. I’ll be including a fix in the next public release of FeedWordPress (a few days from now), but in the meantime, here is a quick DIY fix that you can apply yourself, if you don’t mind making a quick edit to feedwordpress.php.
Grab a copy of feedwordpress.php from your web host and bring it up in your favorite text editor.
Go to line 1841. It should look like this:
WP_SimplePie_File::WP_SimplePie_File($url, $timeout, $redirects, $headers, $useragent, $force_fsockopen);
In the text editor, change the line so that it looks like this instead:
parent::__construct($url, $timeout,
$redirects, $headers, $useragent,
$force_fsockopen);
Save changes, upload back to the web server, and see if it fixes the problem you’re encountering.
If this solves your problem, then the fix should be bundled into the next release of FWP, so future upgrades should not be a problem.”
Now I have to admit… I am a lazy person. This is why I won’t update wordpress now on this site. I need to have that site up and running, cannot play with it. When I will build some other one, maybe I will try to fix it this way. If I would have got this answer a little bit sooner, than I would have been tried it without a doubt. Hopefully this will be fixed in the next release of the plugin.
Anyway, for me this is yet another lesson to be learn… with WordPress it is not always the best idea to do the “update it right away” method. It is not the first time that there are minor, but very annoying issues still to be fixed. So I will go the other way… I will let my sites with inferior versions for a little while, and see what happens.
