”An error has occurred” showing up on all pages

• fadedbeauty

  said

  Overnight almost every site that I have Vellum on ( around 10) have developed an issue where they are displaying an error on top of every front end and back end page that says “An error has occurred”. This is only occurring on sites running Vellum and not all of these sites are running on the same server. I did a search of the forum for this issue and found one other report of it but the solution offered in there of deactivating all plugins and turning on only the base required plugins did not fix the issue. If I switch to any other theme the issue goes away. I only have one site running Vellum that is not effected by this issue and it is the only one that is not on the current version (it is on 1.7.29 and the problem ones are on 1.7.31). The upgrade of the theme was not recent and the sites were working this morning. I don’t think there has been any updates to the core Wordpress in this time frame. I tried switching back to a restore point from several days ago and the problem is still there. I tried downgrading the theme on one of the problem sites to 1.7.29 and the problem still exists.

  At this point I am at a loss for what is causing the issue. It is clearly related to the theme in some way though.

  I am also seeing this error in the logs in relation to the theme:
  [Wed Jan 30 06:44:32.340618 2019] [php7:error] [pid 14612] [client 45.56.90.122:56293] PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function get_header() in /nas/content/live/ccdmain/wp-content/themes/parallelus-vellum/index.php:3nStack trace:n#0 {main}n thrown in /nas/content/live/ccdmain/wp-content/themes/parallelus-vellum/index.php on line 3

  Any help would be appreciated.

• fabianyag

  said

  same issue here… what is going on?

• fabianyag

  said

  it was an issue with the theme. They just lost a customer now, added another theme and working fine now… not good.

• nicklappage

  said

  My site too: https://calligraphyarts.co.uk . It was okay yesterday and saw this error report this morning on the front and back end.
  Pages won’t scroll – there is no scroll bar that used to appear on the right side of the page either – this looks like a Chrome and Edge issue – seems okay on Firefox for the moment – though the error message still appears….
  I performed a backup restore via Vaultpress from 29th January but still have the same issue.
  Using Vellum theme version 1.7.31

• jeffw

  said

  @fadedbeauty @fabianyag @nicklappage

  The ”An error has occurred” string is in the theme in two places, both of them in the ‘extensions/plugin-installer/object.php’ file. So here’s something you can try. Use FTP to delete the ‘extensions/plugin-installer’ folder. The theme should then work normally, i.e. you won’t see the error message. (You need to actually delete the folder, just renaming may cause other problems, so make sure you have a backup before you try this.)

  Please let me know if this helps.

  I’ve checked this out on my Vellum sandbox sites, and on some of our other development sites, and I can’t replicate this issue. I have reported it to our development team, who will continue to research the problem. Thanks for reporting it.

• nicklappage

  said

  Thanks Jeff – deleting that folder got the site working again.

• jeffw

  said

  @nicklappage

  Thanks for following up.

  We still can’t replicate this problem, but we will continue to look into it.

• jeffw

  said

  @nicklappage

  Can you do me a great favour? Can you ask your web hosts if there is anything they changed about your server last night or this morning?

• elabrazo

  said

  I have the same problem:

  Suddenly there is a message „An error has occured“ and there is a PHP-error:

  PHP Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /wp-content/themes/parallelus-vellum/extensions/plugin-installer/object.php:130) in /wp-admin/includes/misc.php on line 1144

  I installed different backups from the past that were working perfectly before and they show the same problem.

  I uncommented line 130 in parallelus-vellum/extensions/plugin-installer/object.php:130

  This seems to be doing the trick for now. But I guess it is just a work around since the error is still occuring, it is just not echoing it to the side…

  It just came overnight.

  And I am a little bit annoyed, that I had to pay again for support to come here and maybe find a solution…

• jeffw

  said

  @fadedbeauty @fabianyag @nicklappage

  Here’s an update about where we are with this…

  We’re not sure exactly why the error is happening, but it’s happening during a request to the WordPress plugin repository API, and the call is not getting a valid response. As I say, we don’t exactly know why that’s happening. But it’s not happening for everyone so we think it may be DNS or router related.

  There’s no reason why a failed request to the plugin repository API should output an error message, so we’re going to change the code so that it just quietly logs the error and moves on.

  Open the ‘extensions/plugin-installer/object.php‘ file and on line 130 and line 143 (or thereabouts) you’ll see the following line of code…

  echo '<div class="error"><p>' . __( 'An error has occurred', 'runway' ) . '</p></div>';

  Change both of those lines to this…

  // echo '<div class="error"><p>' . __( 'An error has occurred', 'runway' ) . '</p></div>';
  new WP_Error( 'plugin_installer_request_fail', __( "An error occurred contacting the WordPress plugin repository API.", "runway" ) );

  Save and upload.

  Please let me know if you still have this problem after making the above changes.

  I’ll be putting together a theme update later today or tomorrow.

• elabrazo

  said

  This solves the problem.

  Thanks.

  But am I understanding this right, that the Vellum Plugin is calling the WordPress plugin repository API EVERY time the webside is loaded?

• nicklappage

  said

  My problem solved as well. Thanks Jeff. My hosting company are still looking their end for you. Shall I ask them to stop?

• jeffw

  said

  @elabrazo

  I think it pings it once, but I’ll check with our development team and get back to you.

  P.S. You didn’t need to renew your support license, I’m sorry if I gave you that impression. I don’t think Envato enables us to refund support license renewals, but I’ll check with @Andy (the Parallelus boss) and get back to about that as well.

• jeffw

  said

  @nicklappage

  Thanks again for following up.

  Shall I ask them to stop?

  Yes, thank you, you can ask them to stop because we are 99.99% certain the problem is being caused by a change WordPress made to its plugin repository API.

• nicklappage

  said

  Done