A client called today to say the search function had ceased working on their website. Curious I investigated and couldn’t see anything obvious apart from knowing some updates had been completed in the days leading up to the error. Here’s a screenshot of the message they got when they searched for something:
I knew they had an Avada Child Theme. Thinking an update had caused the error, I restored a backup but still encountered the same issue. I viewed the errors via WooCommerce Status Logs and found it had identified an error on Line 15 (full error not shown):
Avada-Child-Theme/search.php:15I went to the Theme Editor to compare the Child and Parent theme code in search.php – line 15 – there it was! I copied over the new code from the parent search.php file into the child theme search.php file and search started working again. Of course, I took a backup and tested it out before considering the issue resolved. I haven’t seen this type of error before and couldn’t find any forum topic discussing it or documentation on the Avada support. This setup can’t be unique…