Scriptrunner (Doug Sparling)

Well, both sort of. But it’s really more a case of plugins not keeping up with changes in PHP. I’ve had a couple plugins that gave me this error in the last few months. We host most of our smaller WordPress sites on Bluehost. One plugin I simply rewrote and put on the repository, the other I had to make an emergency fix to, but I think the author has updated his plugin now. The call-time pass-by-reference removal is the only issue I’ve had with PHP 5.4.

I’ve had a few plugins break when Bluehost switched to PHP 5.4. It’s really an issue plugin authors should have caught, as it was deprecated in earlier versions of PHP:

Fatal error: Call-time pass-by-reference has been removed in...

You’re quite welcome!

OK, first, you don’t want to modify a core file (wp-includes/capabilities.php). As I recall, /wp-includes/pluggable.php (which defines the wp_get_current_user function) doesn’t get loaded until after plugins are loaded.

So, it’s most likely a plugin causing the issue. Disable your plugins and see if that eliminates the error. If not, try a default WordPress theme like Twenty Thirteen (but I’m pretty sure this is a plugin issue)

If deactivating your plugins does get rid of the error then you need to find out which plugin is causing the issue.

Assuming it is a plugin causing the problem, the plugin author needs to add this to their code:

<?php
if( !function_exists( 'wp_get_current_user' ) ) {
    include( ABSPATH . "wp-includes/pluggable.php" );
}
?>

Doug, we have 4 accounts with Admin role. The one I am trying to remove doesn’t provide the option to remove when I hover my cursor over it but others do.

This still isn’t clear to me. This suggests to me that you are logged in as the user you are trying to delete (as did the error message you posted earlier).

Perhaps it would be easier to walk you through it if you list the user names (even if they’re made up, but so we have something to reference).

For sake of discussion, let’s say you have four users, all with administrator role:

admin1
admin2
admin3
admin4

If you want to delete admin1, then should be able to do that if you are logged in as admin2, admin3, or admin4. If you are logged in as admin1, then you won’t be able to delete admin1.

Does the other account have administrator role?

Like @leejosepho, I use Better WP Security to take care of most of that…