Solving the warnings generated by Suffusion on servers with PHP 7+

People who’s upgrading the php on their servers to php 7.x will see their error log full of deprecated notices like this:

PHP Deprecated: Methods with the same name as their class will not be constructors in a future version of PHP; Suffusion_Widgets has a deprecated constructor in /home/……../public_html/wp-content/themes/suffusion/widgets/suffusion-widgets.php on line 10

With PHP 5 was introduced the constructor method:

In that version of php, for preserving the backward compatibility with versions 3 and 4, if PHP cannot find a __construct() function for a given class, it will search for the old-style constructor function, by the name of the class. So, in PHP 3, 4 or 5, the user not see any warning in logs, as both constructors are accepted.

But, with php 7.0, the old method was deprecated, hence the notices which appear in error logs. For now, they are harmless, are just notices, the site still works fine. But in the future, the site will crash when the old method will become obsolete.

The fix is very simple. In each file which is mentioned by notices, need to replace the constructor which is the function named as it’s class, with __construct() function. This implies all files from /suffusion/widgets/ and the file theme-options-renderer.php from /suffusion/admin/ folder.

The users who’s switched to PHP 5.x or 7.x, and are concerned by these warnings can download the fix from: 

Suffusion files for PHP7

The zip contain the changed files, within their respective subdirectories of “suffusion” folder. Un-zip, and upload the files in the same structure, overwriting the files from server.

If you accidentally upgrade the files on a server with PHP<5 (presuming that your site still works now in such environment), there will be no problem. I kept the old constructors in the files, so the new files should work on any version of PHP, from 3 to 7. The last solution was inspired by Christian Weiske.

The next article is about other PHP notices solved and will find a link for downloading a full patched theme: Suffusion 4.5.1.