Upgrade to PHP 7.2 is breaking my site

[webweaver]

My client’s website is hosted by WPEngine. I have to upgrade to PHP 7.2 in the hosting environment. If I don’t do it myself before Thursday this week, there will be a forced upgrade on that day.

I am having terrible trouble getting the site to work properly in PHP 7.2. When I do the test upgrade to PHP 7.2, the site looks fine from the front end, but all my plugins (apart from Akismet) are missing from the plugins page. The error logs read as follows:

[Mon Mar 25 08:41:13.161482 2019] [php7:notice] [pid 30894] [client 127.0.0.1:39283] PHP Notice: Undefined index: wpengine-common/plugin.php in /nas/content/live/marlvintstagin/wp-content/plugins/stream/connectors/class-connector-installer.php on line 275

[Mon Mar 25 08:55:49.969422 2019] [php7:error] [pid 31607] [client 202.154.159.152:10502] PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Cannot unset string offsets in /nas/content/live/marlvintstagin/wp-content/themes/sailing/inc/libs/class-tgm-plugin-activation.php:575\nStack trace:\n#0 [internal function]: TGM_Plugin_Activation->filter_plugin_action_links_activate(‘<‘)\n#1 /nas/content/live/marlvintstagin/wp-includes/class-wp-hook.php(288): call_user_func_array(Array, Array)\n#2 /nas/content/live/marlvintstagin/wp-includes/plugin.php(203): WP_Hook->apply_filters(‘<‘, Array)\n#3 /nas/content/live/marlvintstagin/wp-admin/includes/class-wp-plugins-list-table.php(714): apply_filters(‘plugin_action_l…’, ‘<‘, ‘black-studio-ti…’, Array, ‘all’)\n#4 /nas/content/live/marlvintstagin/wp-admin/includes/class-wp-plugins-list-table.php(534): WP_Plugins_List_Table->single_row(Array)\n#5 /nas/content/live/marlvintstagin/wp-admin/includes/class-wp-list-table.php(1165): WP_Plugins_List_Table->display_rows()\n#6 /nas/content/live/marlvintstagin/wp-admin/includes/class-wp-list-table.php(1097): WP_List_Table->display_rows_or_placeholder()\n#7 /nas/co in /nas/content/live/marlvintstagin/wp-content/themes/sailing/inc/libs/class-tgm-plugin-activation.php on line 575, referer: https://marlvintstagin.wpengine.com/wp-admin/

WPEngine support told me that I would need to update the Sailing theme in order to get the plugins visible again. I am currently running Sailing Child Version: 1.0.0 off Sailing Version: 1.13.1. I realise that this version of the theme is pretty out-of-date now.

When I tried to upgrade the theme on a test version of the site, following your instructions and using the latest version of theme from my downloads, it broke the site badly. Many styles and settings are missing, and re-publishing the Customise screen did not help.

I began trying to fix things by going through the settings one by one, matching the new settings to the old ones as best as I can. This has helped to some extent, but it’s a slow process and one which hasn’t fixed all the errors, not by a long way.

The biggest breakages on the site are the room carousels on the homepage and individual room pages, which are utterly broken, and which aren’t even coded the same way as they used to be (the HTML is completely different). See screenshots attached.

I have spent hours on this already, and I am nowhere close to being able to fix them. Upgrading the theme on the live site will, I fear, irreparably damage the site beyond repair. And I am running out of time.

I am now wondering whether a better solution would be NOT to upgrade the theme after all, but to ask you whether there’s a fix for the disappearing plugins issue instead. The error logs (above) show you what the problem is. I’m pretty sure the plugins are still there and still working (because, as I said, this version of the site looks fine from the front end), it’s just that I can’t see them listed on the plugins page.

Can you help? I don’t have any more time to waste trying to fix the broken site after a theme upgrade, and I’m hoping that I can fix it from the plugins side instead, with your help.

Please ask if you want access to the Staging site (where I am running PHP 7.2 and you can see the empty plugins page) or my earlier PHP test site where you can see the mess that the site has become after the theme upgrade. I can also give you access to the live site for comparison if you like. This is currently working fine with the old theme and PHP 5.6, but I will lose access to all the plugins on Thursday if haven’t fixed it by then.

Thanks in advance for your help. Please ask if you need anything more from me.

:)Ali

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