Plugin Updates appear when update Formidable Pro

I had the same problem, with a false plugins update number in my WP Dashboard. Because I had also upgraded to WP 5.0, I thought that was the issue, so I reinstalled WP 5.0 and the "phantom updates" number disappeared. You might try reactivating Formidable Pro and reinstalling WP 5.0 (assuming you're already at 5.0.1) and see if that solves your problem as well.

David,

Thanks for the feedback.

I was able to correct the problem by deleting the reinstalling Formidable Forms Pro.

My "phantom" plugin update notifications returned, so I deactivated Pro and they went away, but when I reactivated it they appeared again. So, I deactivated and deleted the Pro plugin and uploaded the latest version of the Pro ZIP file, activated it, and the phantom updates came back again! I reinstalled WP 5.01 and they disappeared, so I don't know if I'm going to be in a loop like that for a while, but there appears to be some sort of conflict between the latest version of FF Pro and WP 5.01 that causes phantom plugin update notifications, at least when you combine your experience with mine.

I traced this to the function causing the problem and reported it to the development team. I even figured out a temporary work around. Add this to functions.php and the numbers will return to normal:

add_filter( 'pre_set_site_transient_update_plugins', '__return_null' );

Excellent, thanks! I think I'll wait for the dev team to push out a version update solving the problem, as it's not all that annoying now that I know where it's coming from.

Just received an email from Laura from the Formidable team that I can share with others. Here is her email:

Hi Victor,

Thanks again for letting us know about this issue and for sharing your solution.

This issue has been fixed for the next release.

We have a simple fix that we recommend. We'd welcome you to share it with others!

The fix:

Open formidable/classes/controllers/FrmAddonsController.php and go to line 331:
$wp_plugin = isset( $wp_plugins[ $folder ] ) ? $wp_plugins[ $folder ] : array();

Right before this line, add:

if ( ! file_exists( WP_PLUGIN_DIR . '/' . $folder . '/' ) ) {
continue;
}

Thank you again!

Warmly,

Laura

Yes, adding those lines to the designated file does indeed resolve the issue.

I think there's a slight disconnect for me - why are we modifying their source to correct this issue?  Why hasn't this already been pushed in a subsequent bug fix update?

As community volunteers, we don't have insight into the Formidable team's release schedule. Laura said in her email the fix will be in the next release. We don't know when that will be. In the meantime, this change is available for anyone that wants to fix it themselves. Personally, I am grateful for their quick response.

It's not that I don't appreciate the quick fix; which DOES work.  What I don't understand is why they haven't put out a quick bug fix for it now since this is a widely reported issue.

Or at least put out a blog statement for it.  I appreciate YOU posting this.