php load function not working

Hi,

I’m using a code snipet that creates a spinning album of photos from a picasa web album RSS feed. Up until recently I was just using 1 album, which is really simple and straightforward. However, I thought it would be really cool to write a php script that would randomly display one album from all of a specific Picasa user’s albums.

Shouldn’t be too tricky, right?

I got this to work on my local deployment of wordpress using the following code (separate php file, randomImageGallery.php):

[Code moderated as per the Forum Rules. Please use the pastebin]

I then just used an include for this file on my index.php and had no problems whatsoever.

Here’s the kicker: I tried uploading this as a brand new theme, tried editing the old theme through the wordpress editor, tried FTPing index.php and randomImageGenerator.php to my site online. Nothing worked. I thought maybe this was because my server was set up with php 4.4.9 by default, but I just upgraded to 5.2.12 and there’s no difference. No matter what I do, nothing in my index.php file after the include line for randomImageGenerator.php shows up. Oh I also tried putting everything inline in index.php and that didn’t work either.

I tried removing the main block of php (first php tag in the code above) and the rest of my code below showed up. So I went line-by-line adding a single line of php back in at a time, and everything was fine until I hit:

$xmlDoc->load($xml);

Deleting this line alone does not solve the problem, and I’m really not sure at this point what could be going wrong. Can anyone help me out? Thanks in advance!