Although my job description does not entail troubleshooting blogs, I always find myself in the middle of a blog (whether Blogger or WordPress) issue outside the scope of blog design. Lately, I’ve had several design clients come to me when they upgraded to the latest version of WordPress (3.3.1) with the following notice appearing at the very top of the page underneath the admin bar:
Notice: add_contextual_help is <strong>deprecated</strong> since version 3.3! Use get_current_screen()->add_help_tab() instead. in /var/www/xxxxxx/httpdocs/wp-includes/functions.php on line 3458
From the cases I’ve seen, this is caused by one of these two:
- The default Twenty Eleven theme. If you’re using it for your site and haven’t updated to the latest version (1.3), please do. Chances are, the errors will go away after updating. If it still doesn’t, see number 2.
- An outdated/incompatible plugin. To determine which plugin/s causes this issue, download the Log Deprecated Notices plugin from the WordPress repository, install it on your blog and activate it. The plugin will show where the error is coming from.
Once you get to the source of the error, delete it or replace it with something better.
There. Irritating error notice gone!