May 18, 2026 at 7:56 am #9296

Twice in the past week, I’ve come to the home page of sunygeneseoenglish.org to find the “There has been a critical error” message. All subsites in the network function properly, but the main site is inaccessible, and it’s not possible to log into the Dashboard. The first time this happened, I tracked the issue down to my child theme of CBOX classic. Inside engine/includes, the file custom.php was missing. I restored the file and that restored functionality on the site.

The second time was today: same issue, same fix, site is up again. But what is causing custom.php to be periodically deleted? This event seems unrelated to any installation, activation, or upgrade of any plugins or themes.

Thanks any suggestions you can offer.

May 18, 2026 at 4:49 pm #9297

Hi Paul,

That does seem odd. engine/includes/custom.php is not a significant file in CBOX Theme.

I would double-check the file permissions for the engine/includes/custom.php file and the engine/includes directory to see if they might be world-writable.

Some other things to check:
– Is there an automated backup routine that could be restoring your site to a version without the custom.php file?
– If possible, check your server’s access logs around the time of the custom.php deletion to see how that might have come about. Your PHP log will tell you when the site encountered any fatal errors. This can help pinpoint the deletion time.
– Are you using any other plugins on your site? Some plugins might be prone to exploits. It might be wise to do some malware checks with the WordFence or Sucuri plugins. Double-check your FTP credentials as well.

These are the first things that came to mind. Hopefully this issue isn’t due to an exploit on your site.

May 19, 2026 at 5:39 pm #9298

Thanks, Ray! I don’t run any automatic backups. (I do regularly back up manually, though.) Access log info doesn’t stretch back to the date of the incident. I run very few plugins on the site, but one that I do run is Wordfence Premium, and it isn’t flagging any security issues or suspicious files.

I created the child theme I’ve been using in 2014, and although I don’t see why that fact should be responsible for the issue, I went ahead and created a new child theme, following the current CBOX documentation for doing that. So there’s now no custom.php to mysteriously disappear. We’ll see!