Warning: Attempt to assign property ‘external’ of non-object

Hi @dccorp, thanks for reaching out to us.

As this is a warning, the good news is that your scans and PHP in general are not failing on your site but it would be good to get to the bottom of this.

Can you send a diagnostic report to wftest @ wordfence . com? You can find the link to do so at the top of the Wordfence Tools > Diagnostics page. Then click on “Send Report by Email”. Please add your forum username where indicated and respond here after you have sent it.

Note: For the fastest response time, please make sure and add any information or questions directly to this topic and not the email address above unless asked.

Thanks,

Peter.

Hi Peter, thank you for your reply,

I’ve sent the diagnostic as intructed.

Thanks,

Hi @dccorp, thanks for sending that over.

I’ve had a word with our development team and they have stated that this error references wp-admin/includes/plugin-install.php on line 222 in the current WordPress version. The message you’re seeing occurs when a plugin has hooked into the WordPress plugins API and hasn’t returned a result that WordPress expects. This is usually done by premium or third-party plugins that don’t provide updates via www.remarpro.com, but rather from their own servers. This message doesn’t occur in every plugin that tries to use the hook.

The reason the message occurs during Wordfence scans is that we record errors which would normally only go to the error log, as long as display_errors is not enabled. Depending on your error log settings, they may not appear in the error log either. We can’t prevent this warning without preventing other warnings which may be useful in troubleshooting other problems.

When a plugin has hooked “plugins_api”, it should return “false” when called with a plugin it doesn’t affect, or return plugin data for the plugins it should affect (which should be an object), or return a WP_Error object — when this error occurs, it’s because none of those three were returned from the hook.

Utimately there’s not much we can do if a plugin is causing this state, but the fact it is a warning and not a fatal error shouldn’t present you with noticeable problems.

Thanks,

Peter.