Seems like every few months I have something happen with this site that makes me have to either nuke a feature, or go into some kind of emergency “find an old version and throw it on the server” moment. Previously, an update to my podcast management software of choice wound up no longer working with my hosting providers server setup and as such, that had to be nixed, and before that there was an issue with the Jetpack plugin killing quite a few sites due to a coding nuance that was later worked around.
in this case, today, we have an issue with the theme I use – Graphene. It’s actually quite an awesome little theme, filled with features. It actually looks nice and for what I wanted to change was very straightforward in adapting to what I wanted it to be, within my admittedly limited skill set with web coding and design.
Update: A version 2.0.1 of the Graphene Theme was released the same day this article was written and while it behaves a little oddly, it looks like it actually works properly (as you can see, I’d hope.) Still leaving this article for archival sake.
Version 2.0 of the theme was released today, and naturally I took to upgrading as soon as I could. The theme promised more capabilities than the previous releases, with better adaptability to screen sizes and many new features that looked to be useful. Why wouldn’t I upgrade?
https://www.graphene-theme.com/announcement/graphene-2-0-coming-soon/
Well, I should have stuck with the classic “don’t trust anything new” mentality in technology – the first release of something is usually flawed in some way that will only be discovered once people start using the product in the real world, in this case on their actual websites rather than comparatively ideal test systems.
In my case, the upgrade looked like it went over fine. In fact, clearly it did, but something deep down between Graphene and the server just didn’t work right. Instead of seeing the new theme appear on the homepage, I instead was met with a lovely error message (and nothing else):
Fatal error: Can’t use function return value in write context in /home2/xxxxx/public_html/wp-content/themes/graphene/admin/customizer/options-import.php on line 155
Great. What the hell does that mean? Well, I decided to load that file, options-import.php into Notepad++ and see what line 155 was:
if ( empty( trim( $data ) ) ) wp_die( __( ‘Uploaded file was empty. Please check and try again.’, ‘graphene’ ) );
….o..kay then. Right, wonderful. What do empty uploading files have to do with rendering a damned web page? In whatever case, rather than try to diagnose the code which, honestly, I just didn’t have time for, I decided just to see what happened if I commented out the line.
Same error.
Kind of visualizes how I feel when things like this happen.
At this stage, I was done – I had already found an old copy of the theme (by taking the 2.0 download link and just changing 2.0 to the 1.9.4.3 version number) and uploaded that to the site.
Boom. Done. It was more of a pain in the ass to find the last file version number than anything else, but once I did that and figured that the filename edit would get me the correct files, things were good, and I was back to writing.
Now, the one question I have is: Will the Graphene team figure this problem out and fix it, or is there an issue with my host and I should change themes? Eh, I’ll find out soon enough.
Note that I’m not mad, just annoyed that once again I had a point where the site wasn’t working right, and that my software isn’t current – I hate seeing that “update available” message constantly while I’m working.
By the way, the last version of graphene before 2.0, in case you need it, can be found here: https://downloads.wordpress.org/theme/graphene.1.9.4.3.zip