It had to happen eventually — my first “critical error” during WordPress development. It happened while adjusting and testing quiz and question options as discussed in my post about exploring quiz flow options. After myriad changes and tweaks of settings of the “Argument quick-check” quiz and the three questions therein, I got the following error message during testing.
Interestingly, this problem only occurred while I was logged in as an administrator. If I wasn’t logged in at all, or logged in as a different administrator or different type of user altogether, I could not replicate the problem.
Exploring critical errors on a WordPress site isn’t fun, but there seems to be a default checklist of how to troubleshoot the issue:
- BACK UP YOUR SITE.
- Delete caches (browser cache, WP cache, perhaps a few others). If the problem persists . . .
- Replace the theme you’re using with a default WP theme. If the problem persists . . .
- Deactivate all plug-ins.
- (Assuming deactivating all plug-ins did the trick) re-activate the plug-ins one by one. The last one activated before the problem comes back is likely the culprit.
- Still no resolution? Time for seeking help from colleagues, forums, and such. Or support from WP and plug-in developers.
- At some point you might have to access the server error log. Not for the faint of heart. If you’re unfamiliar with php (as I am, mostly), you’ll need help deciphering the lot of it. My error log looked like this (a lot of it is redundant):
FINALLY, I decided to look at my WP user settings since the problem seemed to be user-specific.
It’s important to note that while logged in as myself, and as a site admin, I’ve tested the course’s lessons and quizzes and questions gazillions of times.
WP had been keeping track of all of it. I decided to permanently delete my LearnPress course/lesson data, which was easily done at the very bottom of the user setting screen:
Problem gone. Poof! Deleting the data wasn’t a big deal for me as admin because I’m just constantly testing stuff over and over. It’s doubtful that the average user would, say, take the same quiz several dozen or several hundred times. (And I can prevent the number of quiz attempts anyway.)
So, I survived my first critical error.
Here’s hoping future critical errors (and I’m sure there will be at least a few more), will be as isolated and as (relatively) easy to solve.