Website crashing when authors are deleted

[Brighurst]

I’m updating a website I made a couple of years back with Kirby 2.4.1. Here it is:
General Economy

Within it, authors can be added and linked to articles. I had some test authors in place to make sure the functionality worked. Now I’m getting rid of them and it’s throwing errors like on this page:

General Economy | The Drawing Center

I managed to handle the error on other pages by using the following code:

               <?php $author = page('authors')->children()->find($article->author()->value()); ?>

            <?php if ($article->author() == str_replace("authors/","", $author)): ?>
              <h4 class="article-author"> <?= $author->title() ?> —</h4>

            <?php endif ?>

Which seems to work on all other pages except the article page. I’ve tried using bool() and exists() and isNotEmpty() but none of it seems to work and just throw the same error.

[EDIT]Here are the other forum questions from 2 years ago related to adding an authoring system if that helps give context:

How to link my article author to my author page

I’m trying to link my author in my article template to the author bio template. I’ve tried using the cookbook method of $pages->find() but end up only getting an error on line 11 that I cannot call a url() on a boolean and had no luck with any other methods I’ve tried. article.php <div class="article-details"> <?php $author = $pages->find('authors/' . $page->author()) ?> <h1><a href="<?php echo $author->url() ?>"><?php echo $author->name() ?></h1> <p class="artic…

Cookbook Authoring System Not Working

I’m trying to create an authoring system using the cookbook approach however when I get to the authors.php template, it breaks giving me the error: “Call to a member function children() on boolean” So I altered it slightly to not use the find() function but it still isn’t pulling the articles and filtering them by author. Authors.php <main class="main m-scene" role="main"> <section class="wrap m-header scene_element scene_element--fadein" > <?php $authors = page('authors')->children() ?> …

[texnixe]

You don’t check if the author exists, should be something like:

<?php if ($author = page('authors')->children()->find($article->author()->value())): ?>

   <h4 class="article-author"> <?= $author->title() ?> —</h4>

<?php endif ?>

It’s a general rule to always check if an object exists (no matter if your are dealing with pages, files or whatever), before calling any of the methods.

[Brighurst]

@texnixe

<?php if ($author = page('authors')->children()->find($article->author()->value())): ?>

<?= $author->title() ?> —

<?php endif ?>

Hmm so now I added your code and it’s throwing a null error:
Call to a member function author() on null

General Economy | The Drawing Center

and ah okay, I thought exists and isNotEmpty is how it was checked.

[texnixe]

$article is not defined, should probably be $page->author()

[Brighurst]

Solved. Thanks