Ping.fm Custom URL broke database of Ping.fm posts – how to reset and restart

Hi! Ping.fm Custom URL from Matt Jacob just got an upgrade to version 2.0.0, which does some database magic to upgrade all past pings… and, in my case, broke down. Now the settings say:

You Shouldn’t Be Seeing This

This is an error message, and error messages suck.

That’s why you shouldn’t be seeing this one right now. On a most unfortunate note, we encountered an error while attempting to upgrade the old pings in your database.

Your data is safe, but you won’t be able to use the latest version of this plugin until the situation gets sorted out.

If you want to be really helpful, click the button below to report the problem. Your email address will be included in the report, but we’ll only use it to get in touch with you so that we can help you fix whatever it is that’s causing this plugin to puke.

Alright: less talk, more click. Get on it!

Nice, mmh? Well, uninstalling and even deleting all files and re-installing from scratch (even after manually deleting all posts on the Ping.fm category) has no effect. I’m assuming something got written somewhere (the options are serialized and not editable from the backend) to make sure this message is always shown.

I went into the database, looked up under the table wp-options, searched for pingfm_options, and where there was:

s:13:”upgrade_error”;b:1;

I changed it to

s:13:”upgrade_error”;b:0;

This allowed the upgrade attempt to be run once again. However, it gives precisely the same error 🙁

So I’ve deleted pingfm_options, the “Ping.fm” category, and dumped the wp_pingfm table for good measure; then deleted the plugin and reinstalled it from scratch (*sigh*).

No luck. Even when going with all that trouble, it still fails with:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function wp_create_category() in /home/gwyneth/gwynethllewelyn.net/wp-content/plugins/pingfm-custom-url-status-updates/classes/PingFmCustomUrlUtils.php on line 61

Aha! Forums to the rescue!

So I went to that file and on line 61 just commented out

/* $this->default_category =  wp_create_category('Ping.fm'); */

and replaced with:

if(!($this->default_category = is_term("Ping.fm", "category"))){
          $args = array('description' => "Ping.fm", 'parent' => "0");
          $this->default_category = wp_insert_term("Ping.fm", "category", $args
        }

Note that is_term is supposed to be deprecated and to be replaced by term_exists. Hopefully Matt Jacob reads this and changes his code accordingly 🙂