I upgraded the Image Widget plugin for WordPress on one of my sites and, as I’d gotten into the habit of, I didn’t back everything up before updating, oops!  For some reason the upgrade bombed and I was greeted with the dreaded 500 error when trying to load the site.  From past experience I knew that the plugins needed to be disabled so that I could administer the site so I followed the directions on this site (under “Updated Method”).  The site would then load and I then reactivated all the plugins except that the Image Widget died with a fatal error of :

Warning: require_once(/var/www/website/wp-content/plugins/image-widget/freemius/includes/sdk/Freemius.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /var/www/website/wp-content/plugins/image-widget/freemius/includes/class-fs-api.php on line 85

I tried in vane to try and track down the offending code but had no luck; and it doesn’t help that no one seems to own up to using this Freemius program.  What was quite aggravating is that there is no “freemius” directory anywhere, but this turned into part of the solution: why don’t I just recreate it and make everything null?  So I made the folder structure and required files:

/var/www/website/wp-content/plugins/image-widget/freemius/includes/class-fs-api.php
/var/www/website/wp-content/plugins/image-widget/freemius/includes/sdk/Freemius.php

And then filled the files thusly:

class-fs-api.php:
<?php
class Freemius_Api {
public $empty=’empty’;
}
?>

Freemius.php:
<?php
class Freemius_Api{
function SetClockDiff(){}
function Api(){}
function Test(){}
}
?>

After entering in the dummy files I was able to fire the plugin back up.  Hopefully the next time the plugin is upgraded it will flush this business out of the system.