TablePress PHP Fatal Error

Hi,

thanks for your post, and sorry for the trouble.

That’s really strange, and I’m not really sure what could be causing this.
That class that is reported to be missing is included in the file /plugins/tablepress/classes/class-controller.php.

The only explanation I see here is that this file does maybe not exist (e.g. because the plugin install process was somehow interrupted/disturbed).
Can you check if that file exists? Just to be sure, you might also want to consider replacing the /wp-content/plugins/tablepress/ folder with that from a fresh plugin download.

What is even more strange is that you are seeing this error every day, at the same time… That makes no sense to me. Maybe your webhost can help with this? Are they maybe running backups at that time or something like that?
If this were a problem in TablePress, you should see this error everytime someone views a page with a table…

Regards,
Tobias

Yesterday, I deleted the tablepress folder using FTP and uploaded a fresh downloaded version of the plugin that I got from www.remarpro.com yesterday.

When I refreshed my browser and looked at the PHP error log, these errors were shown and I figured they appeared due to me deleting the plugin.

[30-Oct-2013 13:11:17 UTC] PHP Warning:  fopen(/wp-content/plugins/tablepress/tablepress.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /wp-includes/functions.php on line 3594
[30-Oct-2013 13:11:17 UTC] PHP Warning:  fread() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given in /wp-includes/functions.php on line 3597
[30-Oct-2013 13:11:17 UTC] PHP Warning:  fclose() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given in /wp-includes/functions.php on line 3600

These errors repeated until 13:11:29 UTC when I got the plugin fully reuploaded.

I’ll find out from my webhost if there’s anything going on at the time for the earlier error and report back.

Hi,

ok, that should actually be sufficient then.

It is expected that you get some of these erros during the update, because people will still be visiting the site and trigger the loading of the file.

Please check with your FTP program again, if all files were copied over (especially in the “tablepress/classes” folder). Sometimes, due to an FTP timeout, files are not copied properly.

Regards,
Tobias

I talked with my webhost guy and also with my team of authors. Seems we have had two things scheduled at that same exact time and not sure which is triggering the error with TablePress.

My team has been scheduling a daily post at 9:00UTC and the webhost also has a backup running on the site at 9:00UTC. I asked my team to reschedule the daily post for tomorrow to 3:30 am and we’ll see if the error happens at that time and/or with the backup.

My webhost guy told me the backup he runs is: “It’s a cron job that runs on at 9:00UTC. It runs a command to copy and archive all the files and moves it to the netapp, it also does a dump of the mysql database and moves it.” It’s not a plugin doing the backup. It’s something he has setup on the server.

The other thing I went ahead and turned off was the plugin Edit Flow. I had Edit Flow set to notify me every time a post was scheduled or changed and I am checking the log to see if the other PHP Fatal Errors match up with when I was notified of the status updates of the posts.

I also have read online that scheduling posts with WordPress seems to cause the PHP Fatal Errors so I don’t know if we need to report this to WordPress or come up with a different workflow.

I’ll update this forum tomorrow morning with an update of what happens overnight. Thanks for your support.

Happy Halloween!

Hi,

thanks for further investigating this!
I don’t really think that the scheduled post causes this, as that doesn’t trigger requests to the files like that. (That’s why I’m confused that you say that this apparantly can cause PHP Fatal Errors, as you have read. However, if this really happened more often (or for many people), I’d assume that this has already been reported to the WordPress bug tracker).

So, my assumption is that during that backup process, when the files are copied, a user visits a page with a table right at a time when the file is not there, and that seems to be triggering the error.

Regards,
Tobias

The error happened again overnight and at the changed scheduled time the post went live. No other cron jobs were scheduled to run at that time.

[01-Nov-2013 12:40:46 UTC] PHP Fatal error: Class 'TablePress_Controller' not found in /wp-content/plugins/tablepress/controllers/controller-frontend.php on line 21

I just tried scheduling a page to post a few minutes ago and it happened again.

[01-Nov-2013 12:40:46 UTC] PHP Fatal error: Class 'TablePress_Controller' not found in /wp-content/plugins/tablepress/controllers/controller-frontend.php on line 21

When I go into a post or page and publish it straight from draft, the error does not occur. Updating posts and pages the error does not occur. It’s only occurring when it’s scheduled to post.

The other PHP Fatal Errors have not occurred again though, so keeping my fingers crossed those will stay away.

Hi,

ok, thanks for that information. That’s really strange then.
By default, TablePress does not load itself when “DOING_CRON” is set, i.e. when scheduled posts are published.
That’s why I think that something else (another plugin?) is likely loading the controller-frontend.php class, but without loading the class-controller.php file as well…

Now, as long as TablePress is working correctly and as long as all this does is produce the log file entry, we should not be too concerned, I guess.
I’ll try to reproduce this on my test installs, to see if I can maybe harden the load process.

Regards,
Tobias

What can I look for in the scripts of my plugins that would load the frontend.php class?

Hi,

you could check, if they manually load the file “controller-frontend.php”, or the PHP classes “TablePress_Controller_Frontend” or “TablePress_Controller”.

Regards,
Tobias

I found where the controller-frontend.php is being loaded. It’s in the Relevanssi search plugin. It’s in the indexing.php file at line 325 located in the ‘wp-content/plugins/relevanssi/lib/indexing.php’. Here’s the code.

if ('on' == get_option('relevanssi_expand_shortcodes')) {
	if (function_exists("do_shortcode")) {
	// WP Table Reloaded support
	if (defined('WP_TABLE_RELOADED_ABSPATH')) {
		include_once(WP_TABLE_RELOADED_ABSPATH . 'controllers/controller-frontend.php');
		$My_WP_Table_Reloaded = new WP_Table_Reloaded_Controller_Frontend();
				}
	// TablePress support
		if (defined('TABLEPRESS_ABSPATH')) {
			include_once(TABLEPRESS_ABSPATH . 'controllers/controller-frontend.php');
			$My_WP_Table_Reloaded = new TablePress_Frontend_Controller();
					$My_WP_Table_Reloaded->init_shortcodes();
				}

Is this the cause?

Hi,

great find! ?? Yes, that is exactly it!

This way of loading TablePress’s Shortcodes will fail during Cron requests (like when publishing a scheduled post), because the “TablePress_Controller” is not loaded. This is not that much of a problem, except for those entries in the error log.

That piece of code should probably be changed to

// TablePress support
if ( defined( 'TABLEPRESS_ABSPATH' ) ) {
	$My_TablePress_Controller = TablePress::load_controller( 'frontend' );
	$My_TablePress_Controller->init_shortcodes();
}

With that, all required files will be loaded, so that the error will no longer appear.

Regards,
Tobias

It worked!

I replaced the code starting at line 332 in the indexing.php file and scheduled a page to post and the error did not reappear. Thanks so much for your help.

Do I need to notify the author of the other plugin about the fix or do you do that?

Hi,

very nice! Great to hear that this helped!

It would be great if you could send the suggested fix to the Relevanssi developer, I’m a little busy at the moment. Thanks!

Best wishes,
Tobias

P.S.: In case you haven’t, please rate TablePress here in the plugin directory. Thanks!