Installation fails on wp 3.5.1

I think you need to update the php version on your server. You are probably running an older version. Updating should resolve your issues… probably anything above php 5.4, but the most recent version would be best.

So this is a [stock, 64-bit] Amazon EC2 AMI image that I literally created on AWS yesterday. Sure enough, by default, it uses php 5.3. Amazingly, upgrading is a huge pain in the ass… I just finished that now. You can check out my info page: https://www.thedesigninja.com/info.php.

The version checks out. I just reinstalled the plug-in and it’s the same problem:

Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected end of file in /var/www/html/thedesigninja.com/wp-content/plugins/widgets/includes/settings.php on line 437

So upgrading didn’t help. Are you actually using any new 5.4 constructs? I’m just a day in to getting a new site up and running, and don’t have any meaningful content up, so if you would be willing to take a look, or tell me where I can find more log files, etc., I’d appreciate it.

Although completely orthogonal to you and your plug-ins, which I’m sure are fine most of the time, a theme I purchased requires this plug-in, which is frustrating, given that I can’t get it to work.

What theme are you using? I’m assuming it may be ZEN? If so you can do a quick modification to remove the “required” aspect of the plugin. This is a theme I built and didn’t realize the plugin was still set to required. It will be changed in the next update.

Go to wp-content/themes/zen/includes/activate.php and set lines 104, 105, 111, & 112 to false and then save the file. So, you’re setting “required” and “force_activation” to false for both Metaphor Widgets and Metaphor Shortcodes.

I’m not sure why you are still getting a fatal error, though. I’ve only run into this a few times with users and updating php has always fixed the error due to older versions not handling the lack of a closing ?> tag at the end of php files.

I use the plugin on almost every site I build and with over 2,000 other site using it this issue has not appeared (at least where upgrading php hasn’t resolved the issue). I’m not denying that you are having this issue by any means. It’s just very difficult to figure out a solution for it when I’m not seeing any code errors.

If you’re willing to give me access to your ftp and wp credentials I would like to take a look and see if I can resolve the issue in the plugin. Thanks!

Thanks for the prompt reply; I was about to ask this question on https://metaphorcreations.ticksy.com/, but this definitely short cuts that!

Yep, it’s Zen. Great to hear that the plug-in isn’t an absolute requirement. Yeah, it’d definitely be good to remove the requirement in the next push. Likewise, it may be good to indicate what version(s) of php this works on – I haven’t ran into any other problems with another other plugins (out of about 12). I’ll make the php update(s) you advised above, to get rid of the warning message.

However, like a number of bugs I’ve worked on in other projects, if you want to get to the bottom of it, I can definitely give you admin/ssh access. I have no doubt that this is working in literally thousands of other deployments. It’s interesting that a vanilla EC2 instance using the latest apache/php/wordpress combo would exhibit this issue, but as it goes sometimes…

I’m not sure if there’s a way you can ‘PM’ me or not – but I’d love to help you get to the bottom of this, if you have time to look into it further. Given that it’s not required though, I’ll mark this as resolved. Thanks again.

Cool. Yeah, I’d like to take a look at it. If you could open a ticket with the Ticksy link above you can create a Private ticket that only you and I can see so it’s ok to leave login/ftp credentials if you wish.

Thanks for the help on this!

I think I found and resolved the issue, which is available in the latest update (2.1.1). There was an accidental php shortcode <? in the settings file as opposed to a full php tag <?php

Let me know if you still have any issues after updating the plugin.