Category Archives: WebDev

Freemius

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.

Contact Forms and WordPress

I’m rebuilding my company’s website around WordPress, but a sticking point is a web contact form. This appeared to be no problem as there’s several nice contact form add-ins for WordPress. However, it didn’t matter which one I used, Contact Form 7, Fast Secure Contact Form, Contact ColdForm, they all didn’t work. I’d hit submit and the page would cycle back (or in the case of CF7, the spinning arrow would just sit there forever). I rebuilt the server by importing the theme and WordPress settings in a different website and the forms worked, until I restored the MySql database.

At that point I knew it had to be one of the dozens of customizations I had done to WordPress that was causing the forms to fail. And after a bit of a search, I found it: my custom permalink.  It turns out that although most of the rest of WordPress is forgiving about not rewriting URLs, the contact forms are not.  This was on IIS7 so I had to download and install the URL rewrite module and then follow the somewhat cryptic instructions here.