Steven Zahm@ cheryl
First, my apologies! I fat fingered a change in code when doing debugging and brought down the site. If you give me FTP access I’ll fix it immediately.
Sorry, but I am going to have to respectfully disagree with Shape 5. There are bugs in their theme causing the issue and I located the specific one causing the issue! What follows is a sampling of some of the bugs in the theme.
File:
/vertex/s5flex_menu/flexmenu.walker.php
Line 16 is this:
function start_lvl(&$output, $depth) {
Should be:
function start_lvl(&$output, $depth = 0, $args = array()) {
Line 25 is this:
function end_lvl(&$output, $depth) {
Should be:
function end_lvl(&$output, $depth = 0, $args = array()) {
Line 45 is this:
function start_el(&$output, $item, $depth, $args) {
Should be:
function start_el(&$output, $item, $depth = 0, $args = array(), $id = 0 ) {
Line 175 is:
function end_el(&$output, $item, $depth) {
Should be:
function end_el(&$output, $item, $depth = 0, $args = array()) {
Line 196 is:
function start_lvl(&$output) {$output = $output;}
Should be:
function start_lvl(&$output, $depth = 0, $args = array()) {$output = $output;}
Line 203 is this:
function end_lvl(&$output) {$output = $output;}
Should be:
function end_lvl(&$output, $depth = 0, $args = array()}
Line 213 is:
function start_el(&$output, $item, $depth, $args) {
Should be:
function start_el(&$output, $item, $depth = 0, $args = array(), $id = 0) {
None of the above is the cause. This is..
In the this file /vertex/includes/classes/standalone_functions.class.php on lines 196–198 is the following:
add_filter('the_content', 'do_shortcode', 11);
add_filter('widget_text', 'do_shortcode');
add_filter( 'gettext','do_shortcode');
The last line is a major error and I can not see any valid reason to add such a filter. As soon as that line is removed, everything works fine. The first line does not make any sense to me either as WordPress already filters for and runs the shortcode filter on the post content. Doing this could have unintended consequences for any other plugin which add their own shortcode and expects WordPress to handle the processing of shortcode in the correct order. On the flip side, this could be harmless with the only real negative is the increased overhead on each page load from running the shortcode parser on the post content multiple times.
Now, you might be asking why does that last line only affect Connections… The gettext function is a core WordPress feature (put simply) that allows text in WordPress, themes and plugins to be translated. At least one of the translatable strings in Connections has the [connections] shortcode in it as an instruction for the user. Adding the shortcode filter to the gettext makes WordPress run the shortcode and this is something that WordPress and Connections was not designed to handle to it was causing a fatal failure in ajax requests.
Another very real consequence of this filter is that every string in WordPress, theme and every plugin will be run thru the WordPress shortcode parser which will very likely have negative impacts on page load times.