Plugin issues: update

Thanks David – I’m seeing this too and haven’t been able to see a pattern emerge. I can tell you it happens more frequently than once a week; (About every 3 days is my estimate)
Might I suggest something?
You write that the plugin doesn’t cope with a lack of settings. Could it be modified so that if there are no settings, it defaults to *something*. If so, something would be better than nothing and it wouldn’t cause the weird errors. Does this make sense?

Well, that’s the weird thing – the plugin is already designed to cope with missing settings (which is what it does when you try and use it the first time). So, it’s not as clear cut as them simply being missing – what’s odd is that in my debugging it wasn’t triggering the default settings being loaded, despite the fact that they’re not there.

I’m wondering if they ARE there but just all blank. So what would cause all the settings go blank after a few days? This is a truly odd one.

Hmm – I see your point, yes.

And also it’s something that started happening recently (approx 4-5 weeks). So it must be tied to a PHP or WordPress update, right?

That was my thinking. I don’t think there was any WordPress update around that time and those reporting it are on different levels of PHP. It could be another plugin that’s interfering.

One of the reasons why it’s taking me so long to get to the bottom of this is because I can’t recreate it on my test sites – on my live, production website. Which makes things tricky but also makes me wonder what the difference is – plugins mainly!

I have been using this plugin since 2 months. No problems till yesterday. After reinstalling the plugin, everything was OK again. However, within 12 hours the settings were lost again and my home page was filled with a very long list of rubbish.

I added a post with many notes on June 11th; last week I upgraded tot WordPress 5.2.2. There was also an upgrade of GeneratePress Premium; the recent GeneratePress basic theme upgrade was installed after all problems started.

Any update? I still experiencing error once in a while but it will reduce my site uptime

No update yet, Joe – as soon as you see a new release of the plugin, then that should contain any fix.

I’m happy to report I haven’t seen the problem for the past 3 weeks or so. Something’s changed – and for the better

Which version of WordPress is your site on Antoine?

I have 3 sites – They’re on WP5.2.2 which I installed on 19 June. I had experienced the problem on all 3 and now I haven’t seen the problem since approx 15 June.

A

Thank you. There was a theory that this was a bug in 5.2.1, so seeing it go after 5.2.2 is… interesting.

I’ll test myself and see how I get on.

Hi David,

Looking ‘footnotes-made-easy.php’ it seems this code gets called unconditionally when the plugin is active because you have this in the constructor of class swas_wp_footnotes:
`
if( !empty($_POST[ ‘save_options’ ] ) ) {
`
Would suggest changing this to something like
`
if( !empty( $_POST[ ‘save_options’ ] ) && !empty( $_POST[ ‘save_footnotes_made_easy_options’ ] ) ) {
`
and adding a hidden var to ‘options.php’ like
`
<input type=”hidden” name=”save_footnotes_made_easy_options” value=”1″ />
`
To ensure that this gets called only when this plugin is saved, otherwise your options will be overwritten with empty options if any other plugin or wordpress code submits anything that contains a POST val of save_options.

The same issue happens with reset options – it is likely reset more often than desired if triggered by some other plugin or core.

Hope that helps!
Scott

Thank you @seuser – you may just be a life-saver!

The same issue happens with reset options – it is likely reset more often than desired if triggered by some other plugin or core.

I’ve taken a look at this and can’t see where this was even supposed to be triggered (I’m wondering if it’s redundant code left over from the plugin pre-forking). Have you any thoughts on this?

I think I’ve answered my own questions. It looks as if the previous developer added a second button to the options screen to reset all options, which then mysteriously disappeared later.

So, okay, I’m going to remove that functionality entirely.