Yesterdays Almerimar Life Problem

You will have seen yesterday that my Almerimar Life site gave a very ‘interesting’ error message if you tried to view it:

The e-mail could not be sent.
Possible reason: your host may have disabled the mail() function…

Interesting in that I had never seen it before, and because I did have email enabled.

The background was that I was posting a picture to the site, when I noticed that I wanted to edit a few other posts, so I went ahead and edited them and tried to repost them – all in Mars Edit. I have done this before and never had any issues, but somehow or other yesterday was a problem.

I checked the WP Forum and although it was an unresolved error at least I wasn’t alone. Media Temple confirmed that it wasn’t an issue with them and that it must be a WordPress problem.

Talking to Tom this morning he concluded that the problem was with the Comments Relish Plugin, and with a little tweaking we got it fixed:

Well this is what I did (a bit of cheat and an ugly hack really to get the site going). I found the following code inside comment-relish.php at line 239

if (FALSE == mail($l_Author->comment_author_email, cr_format_email($l_RelishSubject, $l_Author), cr_format_email($l_RelishMessage, $l_Author), $l_Headers)) {
// Delete the emailed row
$wpdb->query(“DELETE FROM $l_TableName WHERE emailed_ID='” . (int)$l_EmailedID . “‘”);

// Error out
die(‘

‘ . __(‘The e-mail could not be sent.’) . “
\n” . __(‘Possible reason: your host may have disabled the mail() function…’) . ‘

‘);
}

// Add the email to the processed array
$l_Processed[] = $l_Author->comment_author_email;
}
and replace with

if (FALSE == mail($l_Author->comment_author_email, cr_format_email($l_RelishSubject, $l_Author), cr_format_email($l_RelishMessage, $l_Author), $l_Headers)) {
// Delete the emailed row
$wpdb->query(“DELETE FROM $l_TableName WHERE emailed_ID='” . (int)$l_EmailedID . “‘”);

// Error out
// die(‘

‘ . __(‘The e-mail could not be sent.’) . “
\n” . __(‘Possible reason: your host may have disabled the mail() function…’) . ‘

‘);
}

// Add the email to the processed array
$l_Processed[] = $l_Author->comment_author_email;
}

OR so I thought!!! One resolution I tried last night was to upgrade to WP2.2, which probably wasn’t the smartest but the guy at Media Temple said some people seemed to have had some luck with it. Anyway that didn’t fix it, but this morning after the above tweak, the upgrade completed and now the Sidebar Widget wont activate, so although the site looks ‘normal’, in wp-admin I can’t activate or access the Sidebars.

To complicate things further I upgraded this site to 2.2 this morning, and guess what? The Sidebar Widget wont activate, so as you can see at the moment the sidebar is a little messed up.

Now going to focus on getting the Sidebars working again.