Last week I was notified that an error was occurring when anyone tried to leave a comment here. This was news to me, I had tested comments a lot when building the theme, but I got help and an explanation from the Habari IRC group and it turns that there is a good explanation for it.

As I found very little guidance when Googling the problem I decided I would explain a little about it here in case others experience it too.

The error that I received looked a little like this:

Compilation failed: support for \P, \p, and \X has not been compiled...

As I understand it the warning basically means that the version of PCRE (the system that allows PHP commands such as preg_match) that is running on your, or your hosts, server has not been compiled with support for unicode. This isn't an Habari issue but a hosting issue.

Habari does allow you to override specific classes with your own versions but to be honest this seemed a little too much like hard work so the options left were to find alternatives for the affected systems or find a new host.

For the moment I have opted to move my comments from the built in system to Disqus (I was tempted for several seconds to create a hybrid system that used WordPress's comment system but decided against it quickly). It is really easy to implement, there is a plugin for it on habari-extras and I am pretty happy with the way it works on the site as well.

I think search is also likely to be affected so when I implement that on my theme I will check it and maybe use a Google search option instead.

Besides these points the problem doesn't seem to be affecting me.

For reference: I use Fasthosts shared hosting. I asked the helpdesk about this issue and they do not plan to correct this in the foreseeable future.