Piecing or Pezzing Together a Fix for FeedWordPress Error

In the morning email was a message from one of the collaborators on last month’s Reclaim Open session on the Daily Create that used the fably domain named Combobulating.net — ” it looks as if FeedWordPress has stopped updating.”

I thought this would be quick, likely matter that there were no site visitors to trigger the Feed WordPress syndication check. Alas, it was more, as when I triggered an update in the Dashboard, I got a spawn of error messages, the fun fatal kinds.

Something like:

Fatal error: Uncaught TypeError: array_map(): Argument #2 ($array) must be of type array,
WpOrg\Requests\Utility\CaseInsensitiveDictionary given in
/home/*****/combobulating.net/wp-includes/SimplePie/src/File.php:373

Believe it or now, despite so much bemoaning of the Death of Search, I still dip into the so called Dead Google, by the key parts of the message by a search on wordpress Argument #2 ($array) “must be of type array” “CaseInsensitiveDictionary” “SimplePie” – i use WordPress so it focuses a bit and the quotes for required words.

Right away I skip the Ai summary and can see all the results down the first screen are obviously from other WordPress sites running Feed WordPress, one of them my own, the old Network Narratives site.

That’s helpful to see its widespread, so its likely a plugin issue. But not an answer. Because if you take just the answers like GenAI gives, its opretty much taking whatever candy the pez dispenser hands out.

Except.

Oh.

On a whim I glance at the AI summary.

The error "Argument #2 ($array) must be of type array, WpOrg\Requests\Utility\CaseInsensitiveDictionary given" occurs in WordPress due to a type incompatibility between the older SimplePie library (used for RSS feeds) and the newer Requests library (used for HTTP requests), specifically in newer PHP versions.

The SimplePie\File->maybe_update_headers() function expects an array for its second argument, but it receives a WpOrg\Requests\Utility\CaseInsensitiveDictionary object from the Requests library, which PHP no longer automatically coerces into an array, causing a fatal TypeError — Screenshot

This rather makes sense as WordPress previously used SimplePie for RSS feed parsing, and hints at this being an issue in FeedWordPress. But I question the “source” links, the one on the first paragraph just links to a web site displaying the error message. How is this helpful or a “source”?

Well it is interesting, as I recognized the nursekillam.com domain – Jessica was a participant in the Ontario Extend Domain camps I did back n the mid 2010s. Tangent.

The second paragraph of the AI summary, the one that sounds plausible like an explanation, links to a plugin that supposedly fixes incompatiblities between SimplePie and PHP, well maybe this answer s buried in there.

That points in the right direction, but I am no nearer a fix. So I pop over the GitHub repo for FeedWordPress and see it has not been updated in a year. Oh well, it could be worth tossing in an issue describing what I saw and maybe it will light up on the developers desk somewhere.

Wow, this is how things work. In a matter of minutes someone named glg222 (not the plugin developer) suggested a code change for an internal PHP file.

I slipped it in the via the Plugin editor (yeah I know, bad practice) on Confabulating.net… and BOOM, it worked.

I never look to AI summaries to hand me reliable answers nor pez candy, but it can be useful, at least today, to get me focused in the right direction. Having an understanding of WordPress workings and what I could see in the suggestion as handling an error message felt right.

This is not vibe coding (an abhorrent term blechhh) nor grabbing and going to Ai suggested code, its iecing together possible fixes not getting answers pez-candied to me.

Featured Image: Avengers Team PEZ 7883 flickr photo by Brechtbug shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND 2.0) license modified by me… oops it says ND, I am a bad dog, shrug, sue me. I superimposed the google search results.