Wow, that’s a long title, but it should drive people with this problem right here. If you have upgraded your WordPress installation to 2.8, you might have encountered a nasty error in your Dashboard, which says something about a

Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in /home/user/www/wp-admin/includes/dashboard.php on line 647

This has been reported in the WordPress site but no fix has been provided. I found elsewhere a possible fix, but in my case, the new URL would not be saved at all, and the problem would persist.

I fixed it using a good old method, enabled by Open Source™: editing the code directly; I’m posting it here for those of you who would like to do it, until 2.8.1 is released:

[source:php:firstline(646)] $author = $item->get_author(); if ($author == NULL) { $site_link = “”; $publisher = “Someone”; } else { $site_link = esc_url(strip_tags($author->get_link())); if ( !$publisher = esc_html(strip_tags($author->get_name()))) $publisher = __(‘Somebody’); if ($site_link) $publisher = “$publisher“; else $publisher = “$publisher“; } [/source]