Fatal Error 500 When Activating Our Team Showcase

February 13, 2018


This issue has surfaced with a few others lately, due to a conflict with themes that using something called “TGMPA” which is a library commonly used between developers to allow themes to recommend plugins. The unfortunate part is TGMPA had a bug in an older version, and many themes have not fixed that bug yet, which is causing a conflict with Our Team Showcase, because OTS also uses TGMPA. We are using the latest and fixed version of TGMPA however sadly many things are outdated and this issue is starting to get caught by many users, not just with OTS but with many other popular plugins too.

You can check your PHP error log to confirm if this is the exact scenario that is happening to you. The error will say something like: Cannot redeclare TGMPA, already declared…

How to address this issue:

  1. Check if your theme has a pending update, then perform the update, then try activating Our Team Showcase again. Most theme developers have updated their themes to address this issue, so this would be the best case scenario.
  2. If there’s no update pending, contact your theme developer and advise them of the issue. Your theme developer needs to update the theme to fix the error. If the theme does not have an update, we highly recommend you switch your theme, because this issue will cause errors for many other plugins. Mainly because TGMPA is a popular and common library in themes and plugins.

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