When you login to your WordPress blog and look at the dashboard you see a bunch of errors under “Incoming links”, “WordPress Blog” and the “Plugins” areas as shown below.

The errors, and there will be over 100 of them, will say something like:
Deprecated: Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated in /home/path/public_html/wp-includes/class-simplepie.php on line 739
This error is caused by a PHP upgrade on your server making some of the code in class-simplepie.php generate warnings. This can be fixed by changing variables from & new to new in the affected file.
How To Fix This Error
1. Download the file /wp-includes/class-simplepie.php (your exact path is actually shown on the error message if you are unsure where to find it) to your local computer. You can use any FTP program to do this.
2. Open the file for editing in a program that allows you to do a search and replace of values. Important: please make a backup of the file before you begin editing.
3. You need to edit each line mentioned in the error list by removing the &. For example:
Original line:
$parser =& new $this->parser_class();
New line: change & new to new by removing the &:
$parser = new $this->parser_class();
4. The quickest and easiest way to change all the line quickly is by using the find and replace tool in your editor.
Replace each occurrence of
& new
with
new
5. Save the changes and upload them using ftp.
6. Login to the WordPress dashboard. Don’t be disappointed as the errors will still appears – the dashboard widgets needs to be refreshed.
7. To update the widgets and remove the warnings firstly click on the “Incoming links” widget.
8. In the top right click the “configure” link.
9. Under “Enter the RSS feed URL here:” box copy the contents (you’ll need them in a second so keep them safe) and replace them with http://google.com then click the “submit” button.
10. Go back and configure the widget again, this time under “Enter the RSS feed URL here:” paste the original link back in replacing http://google.com and then click the “submit” button. This will recreate the widget contents and remove errors.
11. Repeat this for the “WordPress Blog”. I haven’t found a way to reset the “Plugins” but it should update itself after a short while.
12. The errors should no longer appear in the WordPress dashboard.
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Peter Byrne says
November 12, 2014 at 6:56 pmThanks for the heads up it turned out that i need to change the simplepie directory as the class-simple pie.php was targeting an empty space
Andrea says
September 26, 2014 at 4:46 pmthanks sooo much for this article! super useful even today! It was very detailed even for someone like me, who doesn’t work with website coding very often. Thanks again!
eric says
July 15, 2014 at 2:53 amthanks super usefull !
david goolla says
June 24, 2014 at 6:37 amit worked perfect thank you!
Sam says
April 20, 2014 at 10:12 pmThanks. I’m testing an older script that uses simplepie and got those same errors. Now I understand why. Thanks
Slaven Petric says
October 4, 2013 at 1:27 amMan, u really good. This shit works even today 😉
southcast says
October 1, 2013 at 12:08 pmThis may sound a little irrelevant but when I was searching for “how to fix errors in wordpress” your article popped up and immediately grabbed my attention and that is how I landed here. Now the thing that grabbed my attention was the star ratings I saw on your article in google search result.
Question – Would you mind sharing what you did to get such result. I would most definitely want to apply the same to site. Apologies for being a little off-topic.
Kevin Craighead says
October 2, 2013 at 11:05 amIt’s a WordPress Plugin called GD Star Rating.
Borneo Spaces says
June 25, 2013 at 1:50 pmThis really worked. I’m using joomla but the problem is the same. just remove the & operand, error message fixed. Thanks a lot!
poets says
February 16, 2013 at 3:52 pmits work, thanks, myblog working good now
Samsodin Dianalan says
November 26, 2012 at 3:21 pmawesome, thank you so much!!!
Michael Watts says
November 7, 2012 at 4:19 pmI couldn’t get this to work – for some reason on our main domain it’s fine and we have another wp installation on a sub domain (nothing different in terms of setup or plugins) and the errors occur.
Many thanks for your time and effort in posting this though.
dfx says
October 4, 2012 at 11:51 amthank you so much! this really worked
cikiciew says
September 11, 2012 at 6:00 amthanks, it’s work