Update to 5.3 broke website

Backlight 4, 5 & 6 Support
#1

I just upgraded to 5.3 from 5.1 (I think) and it broke my website. The website it ctmeyer.com. The error is

Something went wrong

Unexpected error: syntax error, unexpected ‘’ (T_ENCAPSED_AND_WHITESPACE), expecting ‘-’ or identifier (T_STRING) or variable (T_VARIABLE) or number (T_NUM_STRING) in 120-page-1.0.3-8-76-menu_3-110-content-2.0.0-11-5-1.view-1.template on line 1136

Any thoughts?

#2

@Ben Will need to take a look when he comes online for the day.

#3

Hi @charles101, I’m not sure what’s happening here. Can you try to clear your template cache by visiting Designer > Templates > Clear Template Cache.

If that doesn’t work then I’ll need to have a look at the file itself.

Could you access your site via FTP and download the file from:

backlight/data/designer/cache

then email it to me? (I’ve sent you a direct message with my email address). The filename is currently:

120-page-1.0.3-8-76-menu_3-110-content-2.0.0-11-5-1.view-1.template

however that may change after making any changes to settings or clearing the cache - find whichever file is currently being shown at http://ctmeyer.com/

If you’re not able to find that, then please provide me with FTP details by replying to my direct message so that I can have a go.

#4

Hi @charles101, thanks for the cache file. This may be related to PHPlugins. Can you try disabling PHPlugins temporarily to see whether that solves it?
Can you also email me your PHPlugins file?

It would also be helpful if you could provide me with a Backlight admin login so that I can try to work out what’s going wrong.

#5

Hi @charles101, thanks for your patience with this. I’ve been able to work out the issue and have applied a fix via the Backlight Modules page.

The issue was a subtle incompatibility with Kookaburra and PHP versions prior to 7.3. Syntax to include chunks of code as-is use Heredocs. In PHP 7.2 and earlier, the end of these chunks must be denoted on a new line like this:

HTML

(or HTML;)

Our code included a comment after that code, which caused a syntax error on PHP versions earlier than 7.3.

I have updated Kookaburra Page and the phplugins-kookaburra-sample.php file in Custom Resources to move the comment to the next line. If you’re updating your own PHPlugins then please take note of this change.

PHP 8.0 and later are the only versions of PHP with security support from the PHP community. 8.1 and later are the only versions actively supported with other bug fixes. I suggest upgrading to 8.1 or above if your cPanel provides the option.