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This has highlighted a real issue with the WP Download Manager Pro downloads – it really needs an
archive of all previous versions, rather than just the latest version. We’ve had to hold back a
version of WP Download Manager Pro because of breaking changes in later versions and we’d like
to bisect exactly which version caused our problem and then we can report it. Not being able
to download intermediate versions means we can’t do that (or even move to the last working
version before the breakage).

This has been reported several times in this forum, but sadly there’s still no fix for it. CentOS 6 uses PHP 5.3.3 and has 4 years of support left, plus the minimum PHP supported by WordPress is version 5.2.4 – both reasons to not use PHP 5.4+ features yet. Other plugin authors have started using PHP 5.4+ array features and I’ve had to go onto their support forums and request them to fix it – all except the WPDM Pro authors have agreed to so.

One big problem here is that you can’t download older versions of WPDM Pro from this site, which is pretty necessary at the moment to
allow a site to roll back to the previous version. Yes, you should always take DB/Web backups immediately before updating plugins (I do via a cron’ed script), but the WordPress admin interface *doesn’t* do this by default, so it’s easy to forget to do so and be stuck hunting for tape backups (and keeping your fingers crossed they’re OK!).

It’s not good that a chunk of your paying customers can’t use a paid plugin for over 2 months now with no commitment to fix the issue. It’s why we stopped recommending WPDM Pro a long time ago and only keep it going on a few legacy projects.

I suspect this thread is typical of the “WPDM Pro Experience” – things break and don’t seem to get fixed quickly. This wouldn’t be good for a free plugin, but users have paid for this one and should really get serious problems fixed ASAP.

What I do is keep the last 5 or so versions of the WPDM Pro zip file around so I can quickly roll back if there’s a problem. I also take a Web and DB backup before any plugins (not just WPDM Pro) are updated for easy roll back. I’ll look at Web error logs and see if the error can be fixed with a workaround (most of the time it can’t though, such as 4.6.0’s PHP 5.4 minimum requirement, which is simply “wrong” – WP core says PHP 5.2.4 is the minimum and plugins should strive to match that).

Our experience over the last few years with WPDM Pro hasn’t been good enough to recommend the plugin to anyone. We’ve stopped using it for new projects a while back and are gritting our teeth with every WPDM Pro plugin update on older projects, knowing there’s a decent chance of breakage. The likelihood is that we’ll be looking for alternatives soon (or even code our own) because it’s not a satisfactory plugin at all.

I am in the same situation: CentOS 6, PHP 5.3.3 (which is the “latest” release from the standard CentOS 6 repos) and just upgraded WPDM from 4.5.6 to 4.6.0 with the same error message as the original poster. We take automatic backups before each update, so it was easy to roll back to 4.5.6 to get downloads to work again.

According to another thread today (“Fatal error activating the plugin”), the minimum version of PHP required is “5.3”, so the standard PHP with CentOS 6 should work OK, but it clearly doesn’t. It does feel like some post-PHP 5.3 code has snuck into the 4.6.0 release, but I can’t be sure.

At the moment, we’re holding back updates beyond 4.5.6, but this is only a temporary measure. I need to know if I have to upgrade PHP or not (there’s an IUS repo that would do the trick) – I’m reluctant to do so when all the other dozens of plugins we have installed across various sites are all fine with PHP 5.3.3.