When I opened the project from Local to work as usual, I noticed there were 2 updates available for Advanced Themer and Breeze. I figured, since they are just plugins—reliable ones from reputable sources—the chance of them breaking my site is low. If anything were to happen, I thought I could just deactivate them, and everything would be fine.

The low chance did happen. After the update, my site was riddled with warnings. I tried deactivating the plugins, but it didn’t work. Only after I deactivated the Bricks theme and switched to the default Twenty Twenty-Five theme did the warnings go away. I figured the Bricks files might have gotten corrupted, so I removed and reinstalled Bricks, as well as Advanced Themer, for good measure. I refreshed the cache, regenerated the CSS files, reinstalled WordPress Core, cloned the site in Local, and restored it via Updraft Plus. I even tried restarting Local and turning the computer off and on again. All those attempts failed, and the warnings persisted. Interestingly, the warnings didn’t show up when I was on the BricksBuilder edit page, only on the front-end.

I left the computer to attend to some personal matters and returned to it later in the evening. I decided to look into the Advanced Themer settings again and chose to reset all the settings. The warnings disappeared! I reimported the settings, and everything was still fine, but there were no classes or variables. I imported the classes and variables back, and that’s when the warnings reappeared. I figured there must be something wrong with the classes and variables. During inspection, I noticed an “empty” class—a dot without a class name. I deleted it, and everything went back to normal! It looks like I might have created it unintentionally, or the new update of Advanced Themer might have created the class accidentally, affecting BricksBuilder.

The lesson here is to always back up your site while working to save hours of debugging—or worse, rebuilding your site. I almost had to do that; the thought of copying and pasting all the pages, templates, components, and blog posts sounds exhausting. I’m glad I stayed calm and kept my wits to investigate the problem further instead of resorting to the difficult option of rebuilding the site.