Black Featured Images after update from WordPress 4.8.23

If I use the firefox inspector the reason for the black images is a background-image attribute at the surrounding <a class=”post-thumbnail”> html element that is missing after update.

Additional I discovered the pages of blog posts are now missing their title image too. There the reason is a missing header element in the class=”side-content” element.

All in all it looks to me like the Canard theme is unfortunaltely no longer compatible with the current WordPress version ??

And I found the following error message in the log:

Uncaught ArgumentCountError: 3 arguments are required, 2 givenStack trace: #0 /wp-content/themes/canard/footer.php(54): printf(‘Theme: %1$s by …’, ‘#1 /wp-includes/template.php(785): require_once(‘/home/web8n3a7f…’)<hr />#2 /wp-includes/template.php(720): load_template(‘/home/web8n3a7f…’, true, Array)<hr />#3 /wp-includes/general-template.php(92): locate_template(Array, true, true, Array)<hr />#4 /wp-content/themes/canard/archive.php(52): get_footer()<hr />#5 /wp-includes/template-loader.php(106): include(‘/home/web8n3a7f…’)<hr />#6 /wp-blog-header.php(19): require_once(‘/home/web8n3a7f…’)<hr />#7 /index.php(17): require(‘/home/web8n3a7f…’)<hr />#8 {main} thrown in /wp-content/themes/canard/footer.php on line 54</span><hr />Theme: Canard
File: /wp-content/themes/canard/footer.php
Line: 54

It looks like the exception above is the reason. It starts to occour after updating PHP from 7.1 to 8.0. So the Canard theme is not PHP 8.0 comppatible.

Now it works well after fixing line footer.php(54) with:

<?php printf( 'Theme: canard by %1$s.', '<a  rel="designer">Canard</a>' ); ?>

Hey there @hessi9 , thanks for sharing your fix.

I’ve not been able to duplicate the black featured images issue yet. I’m using just WordPress and Canard on php 8.0, along with Jetpack so the Feature Content area works correctly. Are there any other plugins or modifications that could be contributing to the bug you’ve seen?