Not Building Database Tables

Hi, WolfSpider95. The database table build process should only take 20-60 seconds, so clearly something isn’t working properly. There are a few different things that could be causing this:

1) If National Weather Service Alerts had previously been installed and activated on your website it may not be building the database table because they already exist. This shouldn’t cause a problem, but I recommend deactivating the plugin, uninstalling it, and then reinstalling it.

2) Presently the database table build process uses AJAX to split the process into multiple small, more manageable, steps so if JavaScript is disabled on your web browser then the “Build Database Tables” process won’t work. Along the same lines if there is another WordPress plugin installed that is throwing a JavaScript error then it may prevent the NWS Alerts JavaScript from running. In either case if you can try using another browser (Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc) to build the database tables that may work. Also, if you’re able to open your web browsers developer tools while viewing the NWS Settings page (before clicking Build Database Tables) you can watch to see if there are any errors.

3) Another possibility is that the database user account for your WordPress site does not have permission to CREATE the tables.

If you happen to know the version of WordPress and PHP that your website is running on that would be helpful in troubleshooting as well.

I’ve tried reinstalling and using a different browser with all other plugins disabled. I’m pretty sure my user has permissions to create new database tables.

Is your WordPress Admin secured (using https)? This shouldn’t cause a problem, but there’s a chance that it could cause problems in certain environments. Otherwise, off the top of my head I can’t think of anything else that may cause this problem. I’ll have to do some debugging and see if I can replicate the issue and then find a solution.

My WordPress Admin is not secured.

It appears to be working now. I just had to wait a long time for it to build the database tables (is this normal?).

I’m glad to hear they you were finally able to get it to build the database tables. That isn’t necessarily normal behavior for it to take that long, but bthe time it takes building the tables is dependent on your web servers’ performance, MySQL server performance, and the connection between the two. So, though it’s not normal for it to take longer than a couple minutes (generally much less) that doesn’t mean that it won’t take that long under the right circumstances.

At any rate thanks for your persistence and for reporting back that it’s now working. I’ll mark this as resolved.