Nightmare!! "fatal error: call to undefined function is_rtl()"

If you see this on-screen - don't Panic - I can help!!

it had been ages since Wordpress had released their latest version 3.3 and I was getting a bit fed up of the upgrade link 'winking' at me from the top of the dashboard

I was travelling, and had an hour or so to myself whilst we collected some new products in Holland, I completed my emails then decided to give some input to my blog

Whatever possessed me to Click that link then??

• it was quite surreal, being sat in a workshop in Holland, so perhaps a sense of unreality ?
• a window of time opportunity I wasn't expecting - so time for some blog maintenance ?
• the little devil inside me saying 'Go on, click the link' ?!

whatever it was, I clicked it - and received this message:

"fatal error: call to undefined function is_rtl()" in /home/jacs/public_html/wp-includes/general-template.php on line 2102

since I have no knowledge of what that meant - the only thing I understood was "fatal error"!!!

You know those moments when the world stops - well that was one.  I could not access my dashboard - my brain was whirring round BUT I did have a back-up for my blog which was updated daily, I just didn't know how to turn that downloaded file back into my blog  and you can view my video below.

TIME TO LEAVE came the call - so I had to shut down my computer wondering if I'd ever see my blog again.

During the journey home I perused the situation - I decided I couldn't be the first person to do this, and I had a backup, so there would be help out there.  I posted to my Wordpress Forum

Nightmare!! Help please!!!! Updating Wordpress Blog has caused FATAL ERROR – Blog Lost !!!

and help came flowing in, so......How did I solve the issue.

A member of my Wordpress community provided me with a video link to show me how to restore my downloaded backup to my WordPress database, which I followed

there was still a problem so I searched for "Fatal error: Call to undefined function is_rtl()" and identified that it was probably one of my  plugins causing the WordPress update to fail

to re-instate your dashboard - follow this process:

1. The first thing to do is to disable all plugins on your WordPress installation. A simply way to disable all plugins is to access your server files via FTP and rename your “plugins” folder to something else (for example: “_plugins” or “old_plugins”), then create a new empty folder and call it “plugins”. see below
2. Now, try to login to your WordPress dashboard!
3. This time you will get a request from WordPress asking you to upgrade your database, go a head do the upgrade by clicking on the upgrade button, you should be fine after that.
4. Once you get inside your WordPress dashboard, go to your plugins page, you will find red messages telling you that plugins was deactivated, don’t worry about it!
5. Go to your FTP again, and remove the empty “plugins” folder you’ve created, then rename the original folder that has your plugins back to “plugins”.
6. Go to your WordPress plugins page and enable plugins one by one till you find the one that caused the issue.
7. Once you discover it, probably you won’t be able to login to your dashboard again, you will need to deactivate the plugin that caused the error. You will need to FTP again and rename its folder to something else to be able to disable it.

If your blog is hosted through a company, mine is with Hostgator, then call them, or go on live chat which I did, then I actually copied these instructions into the chat box so they knew what I was trying to do - once they had disabled my plugins, all I had to do was go into my blog and reactivate them until the culprit was found - this meant the dashboard vanished again, but the hostgator representative sorted that and disabled the offending plugin - which was Pop-up Domination.

I'm happy to be here to help you if you've done the same thing - hope this sorted out your problem.

Wordpress Blog Backup

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQZ1gO35kT0 or

http://jacshenderson.com/2012/05/nightmare-fatal-error-call-to-undefined-function-is_rtl/

I did of course, lose all the settings on my plugins, so please forgive any odd things on my blog until I get fully restored :)

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