How To: Fixing Popularity Contest Plugin for WordPress 2.5

By Kyle Eslick on June 4th, 2008 | Filed Under How-To
Tag(s): Popularity Contest, WordPress Code, WordPress How-To

The problem(s): With some upgrades of the WordPress 2.5 branch, the Popularity Contest WordPress plugin is not working properly. Also, people trying to activate the Popularity Contest plugin on a brand new WordPress install are getting a fatal error or a “doesn’t exist” message when attempting to activate the plugin.

The solution(s): I actually ran into this problem on a fresh install of WordPress. After several attempts, I was unable to figure out the problem myself. Thankfully, a quick Google search showed a post over at WPGuy which gave details on fixing both problems!

Here is what you need to know if you have this problem:

Fix problems with the upgrade to WordPress 2.5

Open your Popularity Contest plugin (edit it) and search for this code:

require('../../wp-blog-header.php');

And replace it with this:
require('../wp-blog-header.php');

Fix problems with a new install of WordPress 2.5

In addition to doing the above, you need to search for the following code:

if (isset($_GET['activate']) && $_GET['activate'] == 'true') {

And replace it with this:
if (isset($_GET['action']) && $_GET['action'] == 'activate') {

I went through both of these steps on my fresh WordPress install and it fixed the problem perfectly!

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There Are 18 Responses So Far. »

1 P7
Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 5:36 am

Thanks, I was looking to fix this for quite sometime. P7
2 Remkus
Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 9:30 am

I was looking for the answer to it just as well, but it did absolutely nothing for me. I tried to use both hacks but all I ended up with was an error message: Table ‘corpblogwp.wp_ak_popularity_options’ doesn’t exist on line: 124

No clue, whatsoever :S
3 Thaya Kareeson
Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 12:31 pm

It’s sad that a lot of Alex King plugins are no longer supported leaving all of us hanging dry. I have packaged this fix and a fix to make Popularity Contest cacheable here. I’ve notified Alex of these fixes and hopefully he can incorporate these fixes into his next release of Popularity Contest.
4 Susan
Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 3:39 pm

Awesome, I didn’t know about the 2nd part you added. This is great, thanks for this!
5 Keith Dsouza
Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 4:36 pm

This is a great tip, I was hoping for the author of the plugin to update the plugin but this definitely saved me a lot of hassles.
6 Leland
Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 6:00 pm

I thought my popularity contest was broken because of the WP-SuperCache, not because of WP 2.5. Guess it’s because of both! Thanks for the post.
7 Thaya Kareeson
Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 6:04 pm

@Leland
You’re welcome. Please feel free to provide any feedback you have.
8 Kyle Eslick
Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 7:32 pm

Glad everyone found this post useful. Like I said above, I only found it because I was having the same problems.

I know Alex is busy, but it would indeed be great if someone took over supporting his plugins? He has a few that are almost required with any WordPress install.
9 wang adsense
Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 7:40 pm

Great, I been a while since my site lost their popular post.
Thanks for the guide.
10 Thaya Kareeson
Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 7:54 pm

@Kyle Eslick
I would love to take over support for Popularity Contest as I already learned a lot of its internals, but the last time I chatted with him, it seems like he’s not ready to let it go yet. The only thing I can do is maybe come up with a better statistics plugin and publish that instead.
11 Chicken Say
Friday, June 27th, 2008 at 11:16 am

Thanks for the tip…i was going to fix it myself but lazy to read thru the code again…luckily i found this page…
12 Chris
Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 4:16 am

I’ve changed both lines of code but still can’t get it to work under Wordpress 2.6.3

Any ideas will help.
13 Ed Torres
Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 3:44 pm

Same problem here with WordPress version 2.6.3.

Besides the changes suggested here I also created a php.ini file at wp-admin folder and added this following line: memory=20MB (due to memory limitations of my ISP).

I am getting this following error:

“It was not possible to activate the plugin due to a fatal error.”
14 Adrian R.
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 at 9:42 am

Yup, the same problem for me with Wordpress 2.6.3. Any idea how to solve it?
15 Guillermo
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 at 3:12 pm

I patched popularity contest using the proposed fix. This plugin is running in WPMU. It seems to work, but the error_log file in the plugins directoy of WPMU contains hundreds of lines like:

[09-Dec-2008 13:07:40] PHP Fatal error: require() [function.require]: Failed opening required ‘../wp-blog-header.php’ (include_path=’.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php’) in /home1/webdir/public_html/wp-content/plugins/popularity-contest.php on line 59

I fixed it like this:

require($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].’/wp-blog-header.php’);
16 Guillermo
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 at 3:52 pm

Better to use the ABSPATH constant provided by WordPress:

require(ABSPATH.’/wp-blog-header.php’);

so that the WP files can reside inside a directory.