I thought I’d write a post about this error message as it’s pretty much the main reason that I ever receive comments or e-mails from the WordPress community. Sadly the complaints I receive from the community out weigh the complements, but I guess that’s life 
Thank you to all those who have downloaded and enjoyed my plug-in and all those who have taken to say something nice.
The problem with this error message Missing argument 1 for phpbb_topics() is that I don’t actually know how to fix it. If you look in the source code you’ll see that I’ve tried to trap “empty variables”…
if (is_null($LIMIT)) {
$LIMIT = 5;
}
Now this approach seems to work on my server(s), and works for some people, but there are a number of people whom is doesn’t work for; unfortunately the majority of the WP community are no more technical than myself and I have never received any feedback on how to fix this.
I’m not a programmer, I’ve never claimed to be a PHP guru; as I don’t know how to fix this problem in the latest version of phpbb-recent-topics I tried to combat the problem by introducing a widget. The widget it aimed at people who don’t know php, it allows you to “drag” the list of recent topics into your sidebar, but for some reason people still prefer to edit their sidebar.php :confused:
I would to remind all readers that it quite clearly states on my announcement :
Support
I’ve always been honest about support, there isn’t any. Basically I write this for my own needs and then publish it for you to use for free. You’re more than welcome to post comments here and if you tag wordpress forum posts with “phpbb-recent-topics” I’ll reply to you there, but we all have busy lives and I make no promises on how quickly I’ll reply to you.
Currently the only solution I can offer to anyone suffering from this error message is to replace phpbb_topics() with phpbb_topics(”5″), if that doesn’t work then please accept my apologies.
If anyone would like to offer a patch for my plugin I would gladly include it and accredit appropriately.
Thanks for Reading!
Thanks a ton Nick for the plugin. I love it. Had the error you posted about here and I used your reccommend fix to solve the issue.
Awesome! Thanks for writing the plugin.
I solved this by adding a value to the phpbb_topics call:
It fixed things fine for me.
Oh and it seems to be working fine with WordPress 2.8.
Sorry, it cut out my code, I’ll just type the function: phpbb_topics(5);
The “5″ is what I added.
It works fine with phpbb_topics(’5′) the problem is fixed.
Thanks for this great plugin!
Hey my problem is now fixed after adding ”5″. Thanks for this great plugin which eases a lot of our work.
im having a problem only a date wast posted in my homepage and no recent topics are posted in my sidebar of my homepage
you can see in my website in the fresh from forum side no links just date like dates dec 31 09 just like that . what u think it might be the date settings?
Your plugin does exactly what it’s supposed to, and your fix for the missing arguments error also works perfectly. Thank you so much.
sadly the wordpress ‘community’ is no longer full of coding experts who will massage a product to do what they want, but a group who will sit there and shout “this does not work, its shit!”. I have the same issues myslef. 160,000 users plus and very little nicety.
ironically the more professional I have made myself look the lower the donation became….
hope it works for you long terms, but in my eyes right now Matt et al at automatic owe us something chronic.
Hey, Nick,
Where you declare the function, put in a default value, then the users won’t have to put anything. I don’t know what you called the argument in the function declaration, because I haven’t read the code – just passing by. Let’s say its function phpbb_topics($max) instead put function phpbb_topics($max=”5″)
and that should solve it without the users having to make any effort.
Thank you Stephen for taking the time to post…. actually I did eventually get there and solved in version 0.7 of the plugin
Kind Regards,
Nick