Fatal error

Please read the sticky post at the top of the plugin’s forum; without knowing more information, such as WordPress and plugin version, it’s difficult to say with certainty what’s going on and I can only make an educated guess.

When I try to install it automatically, it won’t get past “decompressing”. When I do it manually it seems to work

Check your server’s logs; my best guess is that either you’ve run out of (temporary) hosting space for the plugin’s installation zip file to decompress into, or your WordPress install has exceeded PHP’s memory limit (the max_memory directive in php.ini). Either your web server error log or your PHP log file should help here.

Fatal error: Call to undefined function filter_input() in /webcp/docs/webs/206883/www/wp-content/plugins/wp-biographia/wp-biographia.php on line 4049

It looks like you’re running on PHP 4. WordPress announced end of life support for PHP 4 in May of 2010 and WordPress 3.1 was the last version to support PHP 4. WP Biographia needs WordPress 3.4 or higher. Furthermore, the filter_input function is part of PHP 5 only (this function is present in PHP 5.2.0 and higher) and is not present in PHP 4 or earlier.

Hope this helps

-Gary

Thank you very much for the quick reply. I’m running the latest plugin version on WP 3.5.1 (both the network and the standalone). I assumed this information was included when I selected it in the menu but well, my sincere apologies.

I’m trying to find out with my company about the PHP version since the information they provide is a bit confusing. I wouldn’t be surprised if this also explained other unrelatd issued I’m having.

Again, thank you very much for such personalized and fast attention.

If you have shell access to your web host, typing php --version at the shell prompt (assuming a UNIX host) will give you this information. If you don’t, simply create a file with the following …

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

… and drop it on your hosting space; if you visit this file in your browser you’ll get the full version information. Don’t forget to delete the file afterwards though!

-Gary

Thank you very much.
They’ve told me it’s PHP 5 and the test confirms it. So I guess it’s back to square one. :/

It may be PHP 5 but which version of PHP 5?

If it’s 5.1.6 or earlier this will still be a problem. filter_input isn’t a function that WP Biographia defines, it’s part of PHP itself ( see https://php.net/manual/en/function.filter-input.php) which was introduced in PHP 5.2.0.

WordPress 3.2 and higher needs PHP 5.2.0 at a minimum. Though interestingly it looks like WordPress 3.5.1 (which is what I’m running) doesn’t actually use filter_input anywhere in the core code, which is why you may have gotten away with this.

What precise version number did the phpinfo(); test give you?

-Gary

Haven’t seen a reply in over 3 weeks so I’m assuming you’ve resolved this. Feel free to reopen and post back if that’s not the case.

Actually, I haven’t. ??
But I’m assuming it’s something on my server’s side as I’ve been getting huge headaches with several other things, such as file permissions.

Thank you very much for your help and interest. Sadly, my client has changed his mind about using Biographia (*sigh*) so you could say the problem is somewhat “solved”…

Thanks again. You can close this topic if necessary.

Sorry to hear that. Once you’ve sorted your other problems out, you might want to give this another go. From what we’ve managed to work out, I’m relatively sure this is down to the version of PHP and/or WordPress that’s interacting together oddly.