As a web developer, I do monthly maintenance for several WordPress sites. One of the sites, Meaningful Movies, relies heavily on BBPress for its forums.  I went about my usual process of updating the all plugins and then the WordPress version. Since I use, ManageWP with automatic backups, I knew that I could always go back to an older version if anything went wrong.

And things did go wrong!  Immediately upon visiting Meaningful Movies after the update, I saw errors at the top of my page:

Warning: ksort() expects parameter 1 to be array, 
object given in ...wp-content/plugins/bbpress/includes/core/template-functions.php 
on line 316

I also could not get into the dashboard. This was clearly not a good result!

Before rushing to restore the old version, I decided to do a little research.  I discovered  that this issue was fixed in BBPress 2.5.12 which was compatible with WordPress 4.7.  Meaningful Movies was still on BBPress 2.5.10. This came about because the site was on WordPress 4.6 prior to updating and BBPress 2.5.12 would not have been compatible with that WordPress version.  Of course, if I had updated WordPress first, this would not have been an issue.

In order to fix the problem, I disabled all error notifications by placing this code into a php.ini file:

display_errors = off

Turning off all errors allow me to log into the dashboard and update the BBPress plugin to the latest version (2.5.12) as the site was now using WordPress 4.7.

The final step was to remove the php.ini setting that turned off error display as I would certainly want to know if there were errors in the future.

Please check out Meaningful Movies for interesting and meaningful movies in your neighborhood.