Images Not Displayed and Random Parameter

Follow up to my prior message…

As to A)
I removed the wpapi=”true” parameter from my shortcode (since I have JSON API enabled) and the images are now displaying.

So… should I leave REST API installed/activated for any reason?

…additional info…

I was experimenting with different values.

It appears that…
If I use wpapi=true, the images are NOT displayed, but the posts ARE in random order (as desired with the order_by=”rand”) (but they don’t seem to rotate/refresh as pages are browsed)

If I use wpapi=false, the images ARE displayed, but the posts are NOT in random order at all.

Any thoughts?

Things are a bit tricky here, let me walk through these different settings you tried:

• wpapi="true", posts are in random order. => That’s good, that’s the expected result.
• wpapi="true", the images are NOT displayed. => This seems like a bug. Let me look into that and get back to you.
• wpapi="false", the posts are NOT in random order. => That’s to be expected, as Jetpack’s REST API, the one used in Jetpack’s Display Posts widget, and the one used when wpapi is set to false, doesn’t support the random parameter yet, as we’ve seen together in this thread.
• the random parameter doesn’t seem to refresh the posts very often or sometimes ever. => That’s because of the way I built the plugin. I implemented a 10 minute cache for each request made by the shortcode. Without that caching mechanism, a new request would be made every time you load the page, and that would have 2 bad consequences: 1) Your page loads slower since it has to wait for a response from your other site, 2) If you were to receive a lot of visits on the site where you added the shortcode, it would hammer your other site with requests, and eventually slowing it down or even crashing it.

  You could remove the caching to get a different post on each load, but that would be dangerous I think. If you’re willing to take that risk, remove this line from the REST API Post Embeds plugin.

Good Morning Jeremy,

Thank you very much for the overview… now I understand what’s going on!!!

I’ll leave it as is (wpapi=true) for now for testing the image issue. Let me know if you need anything from me.

Thanks,

John

wpapi=”true”, the images are NOT displayed. => This seems like a bug. Let me look into that and get back to you.

I think I found the source of the problem; The REST API plugin changed the way Featured Images were stored a couple of months ago, in this Pull Request:
https://github.com/WP-API/WP-API/pull/2044

My plugin still used the old naming convention, featured_image, instead of the new name, featured_media.

I’ve just released an update to my plugin that should solve the problem. You can check the changes here:
https://github.com/jeherve/rest-api-post-embeds/commit/28bf95efb327a48b310805acf81b831027e5eab4

Updating the plugin should fix things.

I also took the opportunity to introduce 2 new filters that will allow you to change how long data is cached without editing the plugin. For example, if you were ready to take some risks and cache each call for no more than a minute, you could paste the following in your theme’s functions.php file, or in a functionality plugin:

function jeherve_custom_api_embeds_caching() {
	return 1 * MINUTE_IN_SECONDS;
}
add_filter( 'jeherve_post_embed_posts_cache', 'jeherve_custom_api_embeds_caching' );

Works perfectly !!!

Nice enhancement on the cache too! I changed the timer to 2 minutes for now… I’ll let you know if that becomes a problem with our servers ??

THANK YOU JEREMY !!!!!

John