[SOLVED] Opengraph Drupal Module – Fatal error: Call to undefined function mb_substr()

Recently, because a client’s Facebook Share count disappeared, I decided to replace the Share button with the newer Like button. The Like button works but sometimes, the count was still defaulting to zero even though many users have Liked a specific article. To try and fix this, I wanted to add meta info to each Like button. Meta info will allow posts to Facebook to be associated with a pre-specified image, URL and other article properties. Without this info, sometimes the system picks the correct image but most of the time it does not. I was hoping adding meta info will resolve the zero count issue for the Like button. The solution was to implement Opengraph Tags to add meat info to the Facebook Like button. Essensially, Opengraph tags will tell Facebook’s that a Like button is specifically linked to a particular article along with it’s title, description, image, article type, URL and site name. The site in question is powered by Drupal so I decided to give the Opengraph module a try. The only problem was, during installation, I received a server error like so:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function mb_substr() in path/sites/all/modules/opengraph_meta/opengraph_meta.common.inc on line 127

Searching and asking about this error code in the Drupal forums did not result in any resolutions. Then it occured to me that this error was a function error. So I thought it could be a web sever configuration issue rather than a Drupal issue. After sending a ticket to the server management company, I was told that we could fix this error just by including this module into PHP and doing a recompile. It took about 30 minutes for the entire recompile to take place. Only near the last few minutes did the website go offline for about 3 minutes. After that, the Drupal Opengraph Drupal module was successful installed and worked as indicated. Every article on the client site now contains 6 Opengrpaph meta tags and Facebook is indeed displaying the proper Like counts and image on a person’s wall after they have Liked an article.

If you are not seeing the Facebook Like button show the correct count or image,on your Drupal site, check out the Opengraph Drupal module. It just may solve your problem like it did ours.