fixing wordpress fatal error

Easy way to fix “PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function get_header()” error in WordPress

Hello my friends, after a long time sat down to write a post for an wordpress issue. So, Lets go to the topics we learn today.

Some time after completing our wordpress theme development we faced a fatal error on serverside error_log like

[01-Jun-2014 11:25:15] PHP Fatal error:  Call to undefined function  get_header() in /home/accountname/public_html/rootwp/wp-content/themes/themename/index.php on line 1.

Where main index.php contains the following codes at the top of the php document.

<?php get_header(); ?>

Now the fact is its a bothering error after completing a theme but there is no way found for which you got this error. Basically It’s a php fatal error issue for some reasons of functions conflict. But following this error I found a way to handle this error by php where it works by checking the function_exist() on index.php.

To do that we follow three simple steps:

  1. Checking get_header function exist or not.
  2. If exist then add get_header();
  3. Otherwise redirect browser to default host address.

So lets checkout my index.php now

<?php

if (function_exists('get_header')) {

   get_header();

}else {

/* Redirect our browser */

   header("Location: http://" . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . "");

/* Make sure that code below does not get executed when we redirect. */

   exit;

}; ?>

Hurrah ! We have lost the error from server error_log now by simply edit these lines to index.php

By this way I didn’t get any more fatal error of undefined get_header() on my server error_log. Hope that would be helpful to you too.

Isn’t it simple :p Have a great time with wordpress.

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