Cannot import text and photos

Hey Steve,

Thanks for the detailed error report, I’m looking into this right now!

(Strange, it appears my first message was deleted once I tried to fix some code formatting)

Steve,

I’ve done some digging, and I’m pretty certain I have it narrowed down to two possibilities:

1. There are some special characters in your post content (accented or non-Latin character sets) that are confusing the parser. A fix for this was implemented yesterday afternoon in the development version and will be in the next release.
2. It’s possible that one of the underlying libraries used on your server is out-of-date; I’m adding a compatibility check to the plugin for the next version that will explicitly check that version.

More details (if you want to get technical) are in the GitHub issue I’ve opened for your report. In the meantime, it would be helpful to know if an outdated version of libxml (anything less than 2.7.8) is the culprit.

If you have SSH access to your server:

If you have SSH access and are comfortable with using the terminal, you can extract the libxml library version by running the following on your web server:

php -i | grep "libxml2 Version"

This should give you a single line of output, similar to “libxml2 Version => 2.9.4” —?if nothing is output, you can try removing the “2” after “libxml” and running it again.

If you would prefer to access this information via (S)FTP:

If you don’t have SSH access or would be more comfortable uploading a file, create a new PHP file —?for example, libxml-version.php, with the following contents:

<?php echo LIBXML_DOTTED_VERSION; ?>

Save the file, then upload it to your web server (it doesn’t matter where, as long as it’s available within your web root; you might consider putting it into wp-content/, which would make the file available at https://buzzandtips.com/wp-content/libxml-version.php. Visit that URL, and note the version that’s displayed. Once you have the version number, you can safely delete the libxml-version.php file.

I’ll be working to get the compatibility checker within the Airstory plugin updated to collect this information automatically, as well. If you’re interested in beta-testing the latest version of the plugin, I’d be happy to send you a version with the latest fixes, as well.

Hi Steve,

Thanks for your research. I don’t know where these accented characters come from.

The php code displays version 2.7.6 — see screen grab:
https://www.screencast.com/t/lYyC00ih59

Sure, if you have a beta version of the plugin, I’ll be glad to try.

Regards,
-steve w.

Steve,

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly!

If your site is currently running libxml 2.7.6, that’s likely the cause of the issue (since some of the functionality we’re using to parse content was introduced a year later in 2.7.8). In fact, the version your server is running is from October of 2009.

I’d recommend reaching out to your host (from a quick WHOIS search, it appears to be Traffic Planet, which now goes by “WPX Hosting”) and asking them to upgrade to a more recent (and secure) version of libxml.

Hi Steve,

Thanks, will do. I’ll keep you posted.

Regards,

-steve

Hi Steve,

I am out of luck with the Airstory WordPress import.

After opening a ticket with my hosting provider, they cannot do anything for me, as they standardized on CentOS 6 (that’s pretty old stuff) …

And I cannot migrate to another webhost, I still have several months to go with my current contract.

For now, I will manually copy/paste from Airtable to WordPress …

Thanks for your assistance.

Regards,
Steve Williams

Hey Steve, thanks for the follow up!

It’s disappointing to hear that your host is still running an older release, but hopefully they’ll upgrade in the near future (especially since it appears that active development on CentOS 6 ended in May). Meanwhile, I totally understand the “I can’t migrate, I’m already committed for the next X months” mentality, too. If you do end up changing hosts, I may or may not have an in with the team at Liquid Web ??

My apologies that your host’s restrictions are preventing you from being able to fully utilize the Airstory WordPress plugin, but I truly appreciate the time you’ve taken to report this issue and deal with the back-and-forth. The next release of the Airstory plugin will include libxml version checks in the compatibility table, hopefully helping other users in similar hosting situations from running into the problems you’ve experienced.