[Plugin: Statpress SEOlution] cannot activate – parse error

OK, I fixed the broken <? open tag (on line 48) and have come to the next error.

There is a big red notice at the top of every StatPress page within the Dashboard:
“Your StatPress SEOlution tables need an update! (-> Update)”

When I click on the Update link nothing happens.

The rest of the page is mostly blank, except for an asterisk followed by an underscore. Both appear to be links, but neither do anything except redisplay the same page.

I’ve never installed this plugin before (or any other stats plugin) so I have no idea what kind of update it expects to do. There is nothing in the server log that indicates an error, but the JavaScript error console does show one when I click on the StatPress Options link in the left column:

Error: $ is not a function
Source File: https://localhost/wp-content/plugins/statpress-seolution/statpress.js?ver=0.3.0.1
Line: 3

Perhaps there was another error in the activation that messed up the tables, but nothing showed up in the server log. phpMyAdmin is showing 1 added table, wp_statpress, with 0 records.

What’s going on?

It looks like the activation is adding sps_tableversion to the the wp_options table, but not assigning any value to it so it fails the version check.

If I manually edit the value to 0303 the big red notice goes away, but all of the StatPress pages in the Dashboard are still blank due to the “$ is not a function” JS error mentioned above.

This is very broken, I think. Are there any special system requirements that aren’t documented?

I completely removed v0.3.0.1, including all associated MySQL records, and installed 0.2.3.3. After fixing the short open tag in statpress.php it seemed to install fine. I now see actual options on the Options page, though I can’t seem to collect any data on my localhost server (how can one test any part of this plugin locally???).

As soon as I upgrade it to 0.3.0.1 all the originally reported problems return. I guess I’ll give up now. Support for this plugin doesn’t look very good anyway.