Salient Soft

I hit an issue with the Salient Soft website whereby the PHP error log file used up all my available zen hosting disk space, and my email started to fail. It turned out that there were a number of php define statements in the code, where the actual define name was not quoted. in PHP 7.3, which I was using, this added a warning to the log, stating that this would not be supported in future versions and would fail.

I was surprised that the log had grown suddenly – whilst it did have entries going back a number of years, I suspected that the real culprit was likely a fairly recent server side change e.g. in the php version.

The original incorrect code and the corrected version are shown here for reference:

define (SSW_PHPTHUMB_DIR, “wp-content/phpThumb”);

define (‘SSW_PHPTHUMB_DIR’, “wp-content/phpThumb”);

I must say that it felt strange to have to quote the definition name in addition to the replacement string, but this was correct. In common with others who posted about this online, I elected to use a policy single quotes for the static definition names, and double quotes for other replacement and dynamic strings in the code. I fixed all of these, plus an additional string which should have been quoted in another expression, and everything was fine – all the errors disappeared.

I uploaded a zip of the fixed theme (with a new point version) and unzipped it manually. Whilst initially it appeared that WordPress did not recognise the uploaded theme, this was incorrect – it was actually in the list of themes when uploaded manually and unzipped into the themes directory along with all the others. I did briefly try the wordpress feature whereby you can upload a zip of a new theme and install it using wordpress, but wordpress complained about the writeability of its temporary chosen upload directory so I didn’t pursue this further and just did it all manually, which was fine.

I also hit a number of issues with eclipse for PHP 2022-03, as I had done previously here. My workspace got corrupted somehow causing eclipse errors that would not disappear even with a restart. It also refused to rename a subfolder (which I had renamed with the new theme version) for a while and I could not resolve this and so I had to delete and recreate it and then re-import the theme code from bitbucket. After this, and importing it as a general PHP project as before, it all resolved ok, and as before, I had no trouble importing from git directly into a subfolder of the workspace.

I have been having mouse/mouse driver issues whereby windows keeps interpreting a click as a double click or two successive single clicks which causes numerous issues all over the place, so this may have been partly to blame for php messing up and spitting at me in various ways. However, I do not believe this was the only problem, and am still of the opinion that this version of php has issues – I will keep an eye out for a new version to try, or may even wind back to an older one. I must say that the PHP integration with git/bitbucket did generally work well. Importing from bitbucket with the remote URI was easy, as was all the usual features like creating a new local branch from a newly created remote feature branch in bitbucket, and commiting all the code back, and pulling changes from develop for the final merge (which was done in bitbucket) etc.

After all this everything was fine with the website and theme.

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