Suppressing PHP Notices and Warnings

[Upperholme]

I'm working with a version 4.4.11 installation with Wordpress, and we recently moved to a different hosting provider (Civihosting) which I've had good experience with over the years. The migration went smoothly but we're seeing issues where PHP notices and warnings are appearing on Civi pages (we've spotted them when trying to go through a deduplication (merge and go to next record) and also more recently when trying to add a tag to a contact.

The php.ini file on the server is set not to display errors, and Hershel has double-checked everything for me and confirms that it's all good (thanks Hershel). And yet we are continuing to see these errors reported on-screen.

I'm about to update to 4.4.latest and I'm hoping that this is down to a bug in 4.4.11 (although I've not found anything in the issue queue other than a fix to suppress these notices in AJAx calls).

Wordpress isn't my strongest suit, and I guess this might Wordpress-related (we're using WP 4.0.1 currently).

If the update doesn't resolve this we're stumped, so any advice on this would be most welcome.

[Erik Hommel]

For what it is worth (my Wordpress knowledge is probably a lot less than yours :-)) my guess would be to check with Wordpress, certainly if the problem does not occur with Drupal installs.

[Upperholme]

Hi Erik

Having just upgraded a copy of the site to 4.4.14, one of the instances (when setting tags on a contact record) appears to have been fixed, but the notices are still showing when I do the deduplication.

I guess we keep looking...

[Hershel]

Even in CiviCRM 4.5.8 (for WordPress) the function error_reporting is called several times in the code:

Code: [Select]

civicrm/install/index.php:        error_reporting(1);
civicrm/install/index.php:        error_reporting(1);
civicrm/packages/pearcmd.php:          $errno & E_DEPRECATED) || !error_reporting()) {
civicrm/packages/cron-expression/tests/bootstrap.php:error_reporting(E_ALL | E_STRICT);
civicrm/packages/vendor/symfony/finder/Symfony/Component/Finder/SplFileInfo.php:        $level = error_reporting(0);
civicrm/packages/vendor/symfony/finder/Symfony/Component/Finder/SplFileInfo.php:        error_reporting($level);
civicrm/packages/PHP/php_beautifier:    error_reporting(E_ALL);
civicrm/packages/PHP/Beautifier.php:// error_reporting(E_ALL);
civicrm/packages/ezc/autoload/document_autoload.php:    'ezcDocumentErrorReporting'                          => 'Document/interfaces/error_reporting.php',
civicrm/packages/Smarty/Smarty.class.php:     * When set, smarty does uses this value as error_reporting-level.
civicrm/packages/Smarty/Smarty.class.php:    var $error_reporting  =  null;
civicrm/packages/Smarty/Smarty.class.php:        $_smarty_old_error_level = $this->debugging ? error_reporting() : error_reporting(isset($this->error_reporting)
civicrm/packages/Smarty/Smarty.class.php:               ? $this->error_reporting : error_reporting() & ~E_NOTICE);
civicrm/packages/Smarty/Smarty.class.php:                    error_reporting($_smarty_old_error_level);
civicrm/packages/Smarty/Smarty.class.php:                    error_reporting($_smarty_old_error_level);
civicrm/packages/Smarty/Smarty.class.php:            error_reporting($_smarty_old_error_level);
civicrm/packages/Smarty/Smarty.class.php:            error_reporting($_smarty_old_error_level);
civicrm/packages/PEAR/pearcmd.php:    if ((defined('E_STRICT') && $errno & E_STRICT) || !error_reporting()) {
civicrm/packages/PEAR/RunTest.php:        $this->ini_overwrites[] = 'error_reporting=' . (E_ALL & ~(E_DEPRECATED | E_STRICT));
civicrm/packages/PaymentExpress/pxaccess.inc.php: error_reporting(E_ERROR);
civicrm/CRM/Utils/Network.php:    $old_error_reporting = error_reporting();
civicrm/CRM/Utils/Network.php:    error_reporting($old_error_reporting & ~E_WARNING);
civicrm/CRM/Utils/Network.php:        error_reporting($old_error_reporting);
civicrm/CRM/Utils/Network.php:    error_reporting($old_error_reporting);
civicrm/CRM/Utils/System/Drupal6.php:    error_reporting(1);
civicrm/CRM/Utils/System/Drupal.php:    error_reporting(1);
civicrm/CRM/Core/Config.php:        error_reporting(error_reporting() & ~E_DEPRECATED);
civicrm/CRM/Queue/ErrorPolicy.php:    if (!(error_reporting() & $errno)) {

I can understand why this is in the installer, but the other ones are not all clear.

Beyond that, WordPress also calls this function in various places. All this makes it difficult to know when/if a php.ini setting is being overridden.

[Upperholme]

Just installed 4.4.14 with Drupal 7 locally with MAMP. Set to put everything on screen.

Couldn't get it to even display a notice where it was playing up under Wordpress. And nothing reported in the Drupal log. Not sure where that leaves us?

[Erik Hommel]

I would say we have just found a WordPress specific bug that either needs to be solved in the way CiviCRM is set up in WP or needs to be solved by writing an instruction paragraph in the installation tutorial on how to remove these notices?
And I am assuming you have checked this http://aristeides.com/blog/wp-hide-php-errors/#.VQrexMsrQ6s?

[Upperholme]

Thanks Erik

Indeed I have read the post that you link to and included that in my wp-config.php file, to no apparent effect.

I think I'll do one more test install locally to see if I can reproduce the issue...

[Upperholme]

Solved!

The notices were getting shown because of two custom-made extensions - created and installed not by me I should add - in which the debug settings that you would expect when the extension was being developed - had not been commented out once the site went into production mode.

I'd previously ignored this possibility because the extensions appeared to be totally unrelated to the aspects of CivicRM where we were seeing the error messages getting displayed.

Won't make that mistake again.

Thanks for your help, folks.