Back in April I was developing a prototype plugin called oik-block that contained a number of prototype Gutenberg blocks plus a whole load of code that helped me to form opinions regarding Gutenberg’s compatibility with my sites and to estimate the code of migrating to Gutenberg and/or WordPress 5.0. I’ve recently forked oik-block to create a new plugin called oik-blocks. Here’s an update.
How I’m testing the internationalization and localization of my WordPress plugins
A few months ago, having resolved to internationalize, localize and test my WordPress plugins, I started busily beavering away at a solution that will enable me to automatically deliver UK English versions of my plugins.
Now that Global WordPress Translation Day #3 is fast approaching it seems timely to write up an outline of my approach. The solution involves a number of fairly well defined processes, and a lot of repetition. [Read more…]
Multi rate weight zone shipping for WooCommerce 2.6 v0.1.0 now available
Over the past few weeks I’ve been updating the premium version of my WooCommerce weight zone shipping extension. oik-weight-zone-shipping-pro v0.1.0 is now available from oik-plugins.com. This version has three enhancements: support for WPML and WooCommerce MultiLingual, support for shipping classes, and a self update capability. [Read more…]
Weight zone shipping for WooCommerce 2.6 now available
Two versions of my new Weight zone shipping for WooCommerce 2.6 plugin are now available. [Read more…]
Site recovered – sorry for the inconvenience
Sometime on the 12th my site started to produce a series of PHP Fatal errors saying “Allowed memory size of 41943040 bytes exhausted.”. This was a bit of a surprise. It means that my memory limit was 40M, a lot lower than the expected value of 256M.
Other times the response was
[13-Jul-2016 02:54:59 UTC] PHP Fatal error: Unknown: Cannot use output buffering in output buffering display handlers in Unknown on line 0
Problem recovery
To recover from this problem I used ftp to rename Jetpack to Jetpack-f. I was then able to access the site.
Problem explanation
- The site was migrated from one host to another.
- The PHP version on the new host was 5.4.45.
- The memory_limit was set to
25M
. - For PHP 5.3, 5.5 and 5.6 the memory_limit would have been
256M
; a much nicer number. - By the time WordPress started up the memory limit became
40M
. - It’s WordPress that sets this limit, depending on the site. For WPMS it’s
64M
. See wp_initial_constants().
I’ve yet to track down the specific plugin/module combination that causes WP to exceed the 4OM limit.
Other notes
- My oik-bwtrace plugin reports the memory limit on its admin page.
- This is 256M, since WordPress sets it higher in admin pages. Using admin_memory_limit in wp-admin/admin.php.
- I’ve changed my [wp] shortcode to display the memory limit on the front-end.
- For this site the memory_limit has already been set by the hosting company to a high value.
WordPress 5.6. PHP: 7.3.26. Memory limit: 768M - I’m also experimenting with code that displays the current memory_limit in trace records produced by oik-bwtrace. They already optionally display current and peak memory usage, so adding the current memory limit is no big deal.
Google Maps once again requiring an API key
I’ve been porting a site from Drupal to WordPress recently but it wasn’t until I loaded it onto hosting with 1&1 that I noticed some problems with my [bw_show_googlemap] shortcode. I’ve fixed the problem in oik v3.0.2. The new solution requires you to obtain a Google Maps API key, and enter it in oik options. [Read more…]
Disappeared without a trace
Just recently something went terribly wrong and I lost some recently made source code updates that, even though they’d been checked into version control had not been pushed anywhere. So there was no backup. It’s my own stupid fault; I let WordPress make an update that it shouldn’t have. [Read more…]
allow-reinstalls – The WordPress user’s lament
How many of you have bought a premium theme (or plugin ) for your website, which was easy to install… but then something went wrong, or they made a change, and you got a “download” file which got you stumped.
You tried to upload it but the “computer said NO.” Here are my thoughts on the subject. [Read more…]
Total downloads from wordpress.org reached 250,000
Over the weekend the total downloads from wordpress.org of my plugins reached 250,000. Suffice it to say I’m quite proud of this… but there’s still work to do [Read more…]
oik base plugin passed 100,000 downloads
Late yesterday my oik base plugin passed the 100,000 downloads milestone. Another hurrah! [Read more…]