WordPress website suddenly stopped working with "Syntax Error" message

CMS & WordPress
1

I haven’t touched my Wordpress blog in months.

All of a sudden it has stopped working. I am presented with only the following error message on whichever URL of the domain name I enter (I can’t login to Wordpress admin because I also get the same error message on the login page):

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING in /home2/name/public_html/mydomainnamehere.com/wp-content/plugins/grand-media/inc/core.php on line 2001

Everything was working perfectly before, with the identical plugins.

Can anyone kindly advise me on what I should do please?

Many thanks.

2

FTP into your site and rename the /wp-content/plugins folder to something else like backup.plugins. Now attempt to log in to wp-admin.

It may or may not work for you to log in at this point. Regardless, now go back and rename the backup.plugins folder once again to plugins.

Now log in to wp-admin again.

If it works, all your plugins should be disabled. You can enable them one by one to find the culprit.

However, based on the error message, the culprit seems to be “grand-media” so maybe it would work to just rename this folder. That will prevent WP from being able to run it if it’s crashing things.

1 Like
3

Just wanted to say a huge thank you zackw. I have disabled the Grand-Media plugin as per your advice and my website works now.

I’ll have to suss out why the plugin suddenly stopped my website from working and try to find a replacement for it. It’s a real pity that a working Wordpress blog can’t just continue to run on autopilot without issues from time to time with plugins etc.

Thanks again for your detailed help.

4

If you didn’t touch your website, then probably you have the WP auto update enabled? And maybe that one plugin isn’t compatible with the latest WP version? You could go to the plugin’s page on the wordpress.org plugin repository and ask a support question?
https://wordpress.org/plugins/grand-media/
It says the plugin has been updated 1 week ago, so it seems it’s still being maintained?

5

What’s the lines of code at that point in the file mentioned in the error (and the 10 or so lines above it)?

6

I took a look at the file and the error message doesn’t make sense to me
inc/core.php (current plugin version) lines 1987 - 2003

                } else {
                    $file_meta = $this->get_file_metadata($fileinfo['filepath_original'], $fileinfo);
                    if (! empty($file_meta)) {
                        if ('exif' == $post_data['set_title']) {
                            if (! empty($file_meta['title']) && trim($file_meta['title']) && ! is_numeric(sanitize_title($file_meta['title']))) {
                                $title = $file_meta['title'];
                            }
                        }
                        if (! empty($file_meta['comment']) && trim($file_meta['comment'])) {
                            $description = $file_meta['comment'];
                        }
                        if (! empty($file_meta['album']) && (! isset($post_data['terms']['gmedia_album']) || empty($post_data['terms']['gmedia_album']))) {
                            $post_data['terms']['gmedia_album'] = array($file_meta['album']);
                        }
                    }
                }
                if (('empty' != $post_data['set_title']) && empty($title)) {

Line 2001 is the “middle” closing curly brace

7

The error is probably above this, perhaps a bad value within one of the many variables here.
It would require a little more troubleshooting and watching all these variables to figure out I think. This is a mess of WP-style code if…if…if…if…if

8

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