Fixing the Simply Static plugin

After updating my Ubuntu system to 20.04, I discovered that my method for generating the static version of the site no longer works. It turns out that the Simply Static plugin has a hidden dependency on PHP 7.2 (and upgrading Ubuntu from 18.04 to 20.04 incidently updates the PHP level from 7.2 to 7.4).

After doing some digging I discovered that the Simply Static plugin has an included library called PhpSimpleHtmlDom and the version in the plugin (1.5) is the culprit, I downloaded a more recent version of that library from github and replaced the version of the library with that level and (after a minor hack to change the namespace of the library to match the old namespace being used), Simply Static is now working again.

Hopefully, at some point, the author of the plugin will update it and I won't need the hack. That said the plugin has not been updated for a few years so may now be abandoned. If so I'll probably have to change the infrastructure that builds the static version of the website...

My thanks to Github user caophihung94 for providing a newer version of the PhpSimpleHtmlDom library

Comments: 1

  1. David says:

    I should note that the Simply Static plugin now has a new owner and this breakage has been addressed by the new owner.