Since the beginning of this WordPress blog/webpage, I've been using the Crayon syntax Highlighter plugin to enhance the display of small code extracts. Recently, a few days after publishing my small post on upgrading Julia, I discovered the page display was unfortunately broken. Only the post title was rendered and I had no idea why…
Debugging a Worpress website
I had no experience with debugging a Worpress website. Fortunately, it turned out to be not that complicated. Searching for “Wordpress debug” quicky yield useful pages like How to Enable WordPress Debug or Debugging in WordPress. Setting two variables in the wp-config.php file was enough. I quickly saw logs full of mentions to the Crayon plugin. In particular one PHP Fatal error. Even without being a specialist, this didn't sound ok!
[16-Oct-2019 12:57:53 UTC] PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to a member function id() on array in […]/blog/wp-content/plugins/crayon-syntax-highlighter/crayon_formatter.class.php:36
Stack trace:
0 […]/blog/wp-content/plugins/crayon-syntax-highlighter/crayon_formatter.class.php(538): CrayonFormatter::format_code('', Array, Object(CrayonHighlighter))
1 [internal function]: CrayonFormatter::delim_to_internal(Array)
2 […]/blog/wp-content/plugins/crayon-syntax-highlighter/crayon_formatter.class.php(516): preg_replace_callback('#()#msi', 'CrayonFormatter…', 'export PATH="/h…')
3 […]/blog/wp-content/plugins/crayon-syntax-highlighter/crayon_highlighter.class.php(166): CrayonFormatter::format_mixed_code('export PATH="/h…', Object(CrayonLang), Object(CrayonHighlighter))
4 […]/blog/wp-content/plugins/crayon-syntax-highlighter/crayon_highlighter.class.php(186): CrayonHighlighter->process()
5 […]/blog/wp-content/plugins/crayon-syntax-highlighter/crayon_wp.class.php( in […]/blog/wp-content/plugins/crayon-syntax-highlighter/crayon_formatter.class.php on line 36
After that diagnostic, it was just a matter of disabling the Crayon plugin and the website got back on track!
It happens that Crayon is unfortunately unmaintained these days. It is only testing against Worpress 4.2, while we are now in the 5.x series, and issues are piling up on GitHub. For the moment, I don't have searched for a replacement. All code extracts throughout the website display without syntax hightlighting, but at least they do display!
