Website malfunction after the use of Pods plugin

Pods is a content development framework for WordPress that you can use to create, manage and implement custom content – all in one place. It allows you both to create completely new material and to further customize the content that already exists. With an average rating of 4.9/5, it has become the favorite plugin for many creators.

Despite the positive reviews of Pods, you may still encounter a problem with page listings. If you do, don’t worry – we have a solution for you.

After routine WordPress plugin updates, we’ve noticed that some subpages are broken. HTTP response status code was still correct (200), but listing suddenly stopped rendering. A close look at source-view HTML showed:

(...)
<article id="post-393" class="post-393 page type-page status-publish hentry">
<div class="entry-content">
<div class="list-item-element">
<div class="list-item-wrapper">
<a class="list-thumbnail" href="/news/title-123/">
<img src="/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/logo.jpg" />
<h4 class="list-title">Title 123</h4>
</a>
</div>
</div>
(...) END of output

We enabled WP-DEBUG Log to check if there are any PHP errors. We added the following solution to wp-conifg.php :

// define('WP_DEBUG', false);
define( 'WP_DEBUG', true );
define( 'WP_DEBUG_LOG', 'wp-content/ct_debugging.log');
define( 'WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false );

However, the error log didn’t show any critical errors. We had to conduct a more in-depth investigation: listings are rendered by wordpress plugin: Pods – Custom Content Types and Fields 2.7.21.
In Wp-admin / Pods Admin / Pod Templates / news-root there was the following template:

[before]
<div class="main-list">
[/before]
<div class="list-item-element">
<div class="list-item-wrapper">
<a class="list-thumbnail" href="{@permalink}">
<img src="{@post_thumbnail_url.full}" />
<h4 class="list-title">{@post_title}</h4>
</a>
</div>
</div>
[after]
</div>
[/after]

The bug was caused by {@post_thumbnail_url.full} in a situation when the “featured image” wasn’t added to the news. In the previous plugin version, it was working totally fine.

Solution

We introduced special tags into the template: [if post_thumbnail][/if]
After adding those, the page started to work correctly again.

[before] 
<div class="main-list"> 
[/before] 
<div class="list-item-element"> 
<div class="list-item-wrapper"> 
<a class="list-thumbnail" href="{@permalink}">
 [if post_thumbnail] 
<img src="{@post_thumbnail_url.full}" />
[/if] 
<h4 class="list-title">{@post_title}</h4>
</a> 
</div> 
</div> 
[after] 
</div> 
[/after]

Update

Some time later, the bug was fixed in the next plugin release (2.7.22). More info here: https://github.com/pods-framework/pods/pull/5805
= 2.7.22 – August 13th 2020 =
**Bug Fixes**
* Fixed: Prevent fatal errors about memory when using certain magic tag / thumbnail combinations. #5805 (@JoryHogeveen)