A while ago I found a theme called “Games Zone”, by Themefuse, that used a custom widget to add information from a custom post type into the sidebar of a post. I spent some time tearing down the code to get just this feature to work with another theme, but it doesn’t seem to work properly after my host upgraded to PHP 8. I can revert the site to PHP 7.4 and it still works as it should, but my host is removing PHP 7 support at the end of September.
As much as I want to contact the developer, Themefuse was rebranded several years ago, and the Games Zone theme is no longer available. I also no longer have the original theme saved anywhere.
My understanding of how Games Zone did this was that it would create a custom post type, a meta box at the bottom of the “New Posts page”, and it would register a custom widget that would pull in the data from the custom post type and put it into the sidebar.
When you make a post, you could start typing the name of a custom post type and it would search the names of the custom posts and give you a list of posts so you could choose which one appears in the sidebar. With the update to PHP 8, when I start to type in the name of a custom post type, I get a 500 error.
“Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 500 ()” https://[wesitedomain]/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=hofisiwba_get_suggest&type=post&name=content&q=test
At the end of the link, the q= is the query for what is being typed into the custom meta box on the post page.
I don’t think I’m going to be able to find another copy of the Games Zone theme to take another shot at reworking the code from scratch, so I’m either looking for another WordPress theme that does the same thing, or a tutorial that would do a decent job walking me through the process. Can anyone point me in the right direction for this?
