The heartbeat control plugin caused a major issue…
If you are using the Heartbeat Control Plugin and did an update to it, you will find that it crashed your site. Funny thing here is that this plugin is widely used with over 80,000 active installs but was not updated in over 2 years and the plugin developer just pushed out an update today which causes sites to lock up and not load due to a fatal PHP error. Future updates hopefully will correct this.
Here Is The Problem Below:
After updating the plugins installed on the website, instead of the “update successful” message as usual, the site crashed and now the following error message is displayed when trying to load the site:
Warning: require_once(/wp-content/plugins/heartbeat-controlautoloader.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /wp-content/plugins/heartbeat-control/heartbeat-control.php on line 36 Fatal error: require_once(): Failed opening required '/wp-content/plugins/heartbeat-controlautoloader.php' (include_path='.:/usr/local/php56/pear') in /wp-content/plugins/heartbeat-control/heartbeat-control.php on line 36
The Correction Is:
There is been missing a slash on line 36 in the “heartbeat-control.php” file of the plugin. To fix this, you need to use either FTP or your web hosting control panel to navigate to this file and add the missing slash.
WHAT IT IS AT LINE 36
require_once( dirname( __FILE__ ) . 'autoloader.php' );
WHAT IT SHOULD BE AT LINE 36
require_once( dirname( __FILE__ ) . '/autoloader.php' );
Sometimes, pushing updates after pulling an all-nighter isn’t a very good idea ;)
After quite a few requests, I decided to make a large update to the plugin.
I was alerted of the issue about 2 hours after the push, and fixed the terrible typo. Any current updates or new installs will get a fully working copy.
From my estimate, less than 4,000 sites got the bad update, so thankfully my quick reaction shouldn’t have too much widespread damage. I’m also working with web hosts such as A2 Hosting to fix the issue to anyone who might have gotten the update but haven’t realized it yet.
It seems that in 2 years of non-updating the plugin, author lost his “touch” :-)
I haven’t lost my touch at all. Just a typo in a mistaken push ;)
Mistakes happen, we are all humans, it is important that error is corrected and very fast.
You are THEBOBM.com man. Thanks for all you do and love your work! We use your plugin on all of our Speed Up services.
I’m sure neither of you have made any mistakes in coding before?
Just saying, everyone has these, no one is error free 100% of the time.
Only kind of code that is immune to error is code not written…;) CODE IS POETRY…YUP!!!