Hi guys,
We’ve been dealing with a recent mistery in our website running Newspaper, GoalPoint.pt.
Suddently none of the category links work, both on web and mobile versions. Either it’s a category landing page or even the search page, all we get is a blank page when trying to view a category url, coming from the menu or article category tags clicks.
The response is not empty (there is actually a significant amount of code in the response, up and including the custom JS code stored in the theme panel).
We checked the apache logs as well as the wp debug log and there isn’t anything recorded in terms of errors.
The website is currently running on wp 4.6.1, newspaper 7.4 (we just updated to see if it sorted the problem). However the exact behaviour was evident with v7.1.1.
To make it even more misterious: we have a staging version running on a private server with the exact same setup (same theme and WP version plus the same set of plugins) and… we don’t get that error, all category links work fine.
We are clueless, can anybody help out? Thanks
Pedro Ferreira
GoalPoint.pt
Hoping that it helps, here is the content of our current htacces file:
ewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 443
RewriteRule (.*) http://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
## add a trailing slash to /wp-admin
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?wp-admin$ $1wp-admin/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(wp-(content|admin|includes).*) – [L]
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(.*\.php)$ – [L]
RewriteRule . index.php [L]
Hi all,
Just to add some more detail. We have changed the WP debug settings and we can see the following lines in debug.log
[06-Oct-2016 20:46:11 UTC] PHP Notice: Use of undefined constant FS_CHMOD_DIR - assumed 'FS_CHMOD_DIR' in /var/www/wp-admin/includes/class-wp-filesystem-direct.php on line 432
[06-Oct-2016 20:46:11 UTC] PHP Notice: Use of undefined constant FS_CHMOD_DIR - assumed 'FS_CHMOD_DIR' in /var/www/web/wp-admin/includes/class-wp-filesystem-direct.php on line 432
[06-Oct-2016 20:46:11 UTC] PHP Notice: Use of undefined constant FS_CHMOD_FILE - assumed 'FS_CHMOD_FILE' in /var/www/web/wp-content/plugins/simple-cache/inc/dropins/file-based-page-cache.php on line 156
Not sure if related, but do you have any idea on how to resolve this?
Regards
Hi,
Well one of the errors n you debug refers to a simplecache plugin. It could either be that plugin or another one. We suggest disabling all plugins except visual composer, clear cache and reset cdn files if you use it. Then test your site without the plugins to see if you still get the errors.
As for the caching plugin we recommend wp super cache and these settings: https://forum.tagdiv.com/cache-plugin-install-and-configure/
Thank you!
Hi Bogdan,
We disabled the simplecache plugin, and installed WP Super Cache, and the behaviour is the same.
We also run the site without WP Super Cache with the same behaviour.
The next thing to try is to increase the WP Memory Limit from 64MB (to 256MB just to test) and see if that gives us any joy.
I will report back.
Cheers
Probably good to check things that change category behaviors like permalink settings; Yoast SEO category strip and slug shortening, and try resaving permalinks as well as clearing transients.
Also adding explicit URL for website in the wp-config.php file can help too.
Hi All,
Just reporting back, that the issue is now fixed.
After all, it was deeper than the theme and WordPress, and related to the setup of the server.
Switched to PHP v5.5.9 and all the issues were gone. Must be some issue with the setup of PHP v7.0, which was a little anothodox.
The website is now working as expected, we will revisit PHPv7 at a later date.
Thanks all
p.s. Chris S – We suspected that at first, mainly as a result of multiple google searches. But it did not fix the issue.
