Support

August 17, 2023 at 9:13 am

Hi there,

That error is telling you that something is overriding a method within core but isn’t compatible and needs to be updated.

Do you have the full stack trace? The above doesn’t have enough data to narrow down what the cause is.

August 17, 2023 at 10:30 am

Normally it would be shown with the above error but you may need to enable WP_DEBUG:

https://eventespresso.com/wiki/troubleshooting-checklist/#wpdebug

August 17, 2023 at 2:06 pm

Just to note, I’ve just checked the latest zip file to confirm the function signature (which is what is throwing the fatal above) and I can’t see anywhere within the latest update that declares get_join_statment() differently.

This is searching the entire EE core plugin codebase:

https://monosnap.com/file/BWA7Wh3ZxloBHsSNiebjaKt6DP2A6U

The file is declared 7 times across its classes, and the signature for all of those match:

function get_join_statement(string $model_relation_chain): string

The error you are getting states that EE_Belongs_To_Relation::get_join_statement($model_relation_chain) is missing the string declaration within EE_Belongs_To_Relation, but that’s the second function returned in my search and it matches.

How did you update Event Espresso on the site? Using FTP or via the plugins menu?

Looks like either the update hasn’t replaced all the files or something else on that site is also overriding a get_join_statement() method somewhere but I need the full stacktrace to be able to narrow this down further.

August 18, 2023 at 1:11 pm

My hosts don’t hold a master log of PHP errors, so as this ‘fatal’ error only occurred during an update they advise that I manually update/overwrite with the latest plugin files via FTP.

This would be literally the last thing I would advise.

Overwriting plugins via FTP it messy, too many people try to copy/replace (which actually sounds like what is being recommended with ‘overwrite’ here) and it causes more errors.

Just to clarify for anyone reading, when updating via FTP you need to delete the original plugin directory and then extract the new one in its place, that’s what WP core does.

So to give an example you would actually delete /wp-content/plugins/event-espresso-core-reg/

Then extract the event-espresso-core-reg directory out of our .zip file into /wp-content/plugins/. My advice is to never overwrite an existing plugin with a new update but delete and replace it. Files move, files change names, overwriting and replacing on the fly will at some point cause you issues.

However, as I understand it from one of your previous answers, the fatal error was in the database update, not in the files.

No it’s a compile error, so most likely was from a file at some point but where I have no idea.

There isn’t an EE database update between 5.0.8 and 5.0.9 (we call them migrations), those will only happen with major or minor version bumps, 4.X.X -> 5.X.X or 5.0.X -> 5.1.X, never a ‘patch’ like 5.0.8 -> 5.0.9.

Given that I have no visible errors and that the plugin appears to be functioning fine, is there anything to be gained by overwriting the files manually?

Not in my opinion, no.

I’d like to tell you what caused it, but there just isn’t enough info to do so unfortunately, we’ve not had any other reported of that error and as its a compile error it would be widespread if it was from the update itself.