[Plugin: WordPress Download Monitor] Think Twice before using this plugin (WARNING) !!!

Seems ok to me.

I felt compelled to login when I read this post and put my thoughts into writing:

I like this plugin. I appreciate the plugin author (Mike Jolley) for his hard work and time and dedication in creating something like this available for everyone to use, so thank you!

Just to be clear I am not a coder and therefore from my perspective I cannot possibly analyse the efficiency of the code that powers this clearly very powerful plugin.

It is great that Tabish has taken the time to detail his/her findings and hopefully help to improve the plugin in the long run, especially when he/she is clearly talking about hundreds of categories (I have personally never found the need to use more than 5 if at all) but just reading the title of the post, I can’t help but feel that it is not the most appropriate description of the issue that has been identified!

Most users probably don’t extend the plugin as much as Tabish has done, so would never encounter this ‘too many queries’ issue. I’m sure a plugin author is almost always pleased that someone is pushing the boundaries, but

“Think twice before using this plugin (WARNING)!!!”

sounds more like scaremongering, akin to tabloid headlines, and it might be LESS confusing and LESS misleading to say specifically – in the title – something like

‘Too many SQL queries occur when setting up hundreds of categories’.

Apologies if this is not the most appropriate title, and I hope I am being clear about what I am trying to say here. Ultimately, like vektor has said, I would love it if a solution could be worked out between both Mike Jolley and Tabish as I believe both will/have benefit, and non-power users (aka myself) will – unknowingly – also benefit, with thanks to developers like them, from a great plugin.

Plugin authors put in hundreds of unpaid hours into their code. If you find a problem in a plugin, don’t post “DO NOT USE it” publicly. As jolley_small states, this annoys the author, makes users less likely to install the plugin, and thereby makes the author less interested in working on the plugin.

Just state what the problem is, and try to get the problem solved.

We’re operating in a gift economy here. Civility and friendliness go a long way.

Ok.. No more arguments.. lets resolve the issue togather.

jolley_small can you tell me buddy why we need to parse Sub Cats in this function? May be i am not getting this point here.. so pls explain this to me.

Because The way I have customized your plugin.. i didn’t use the sub cat thing and it’s working perfectly right.

Let me know so that we can finish these changes together.

I truly appreciate your work.. what you have done.. is remarkable and I tried to see how to edit the title of my post but I couldn’t.. so sorry for that.. may be i should have used a little more polite language.. my fault dude

Regards

800 freaking hundred categories? Holy downloads Batman!

Just tell me.. should I use this if I’m expecting at most 20 categories sometime well in the future?

Actually, I’m looking for a download manager that allows the category names only to be dynamically populated in the sidebar – because the Lester Chan one does not and a not that recent post says he’s not gonna do it.

yes Tdiaz .. you can use it for your 20 categories. ??

@thanks mosey and erigami.

@tabish – We check for sub cats because we output the downloads when showing a parent (the code I sent allowed this and used your method as much as possible).

Example:

A download has 1 category defined.

Each category can have a parent. On the manage screen these are shown like this:

2. Top Category – 3. Child – 4. Last child

Lets say we had two in category 2 and one download in category 4. When we output category 2 we want to display its two downloads BUT ALSO grab the single download in the sub category, because technically its still in this category, just a sub cat.

That’s why we have to find child categories by querying the children.

Make sense?

Jolly,

Technically displaying sub cats download in parent is not fine. Anyway.. Below is my coding which i customized for my site.. and the output of my code and yours are same.. even I dont use subcats select query..

function wp_dlm_parse_downloads_cats($data)
{ // Our Function Starts
global $table_prefix,$wpdb,$wp_dlm_root,$allowed_extentions,$max_upload_size,$wp_dlm_db,$wp_dlm_db_cats;
if (substr_count($data,"[download_cat#")) {
preg_match_all("|\[download_cat#(.*)\]|U",$data,$result,PREG_SET_ORDER);
$url = get_option('wp_dlm_url');
$downloadurl = get_bloginfo('wpurl').'/'.$url;
if (empty($url)) $downloadurl = $wp_dlm_root.'download.php?id=';
$count_result=count($result);
$count_var=1;
$ul_start="<!-- Starts Download UL --><ul id=\"downloadlinks\">";
foreach ($result as $val)
	{

		$query ="SELECT * FROM wp_DLM_DOWNLOADS WHERE category_id=$val[1] ORDER BY 'title'";
		$downloads = $wpdb->get_results($query);
		//echo($query.'<br />');
		if (!empty($downloads)) {
		foreach($downloads as $d) {
		$downloadlink = $d->id;
        //print_r($downloads);
		$fileext=substr(strrchr(($d->filename), '.'), 1);
		$links.= $ul_start.'<li><a href="'.$downloadurl.$downloadlink.'" title="'.__("Downloaded","wp-download_monitor").' '.$d->hits.' '.__("times","wp-download_monitor").'" >'.$d->title.'</a><BR /><span class="downloadedtimes">('.$d->hits.' downloads)</span> </li>';	

		$ul_start='';
		} // for each ends data one
		if($count_result==$count_var){ $links.="</ul><!-- Ends Download UL -->"; }
		$count_var++;
		$data=str_replace($val[0], $links, $data);
		$links='';
		} // IF Ends
	}

} //IF ends.. download_cat matching
	//echo($query);
return $data;
} // Our Functions Ends

It’s a complete code which i modified for my site. I am not using few of your default functions.. because I didnt need them.. (Like downloadtype case)

Please run my code and make sub cats and all.. and then compare both codes.

Let me know.
Tabish

As far as i could understood your Subcat logic.. you are saying that All the SubCat’s download should show in Parent category?

So that means if I have a category called:

Pop Songs (20 download)
then Sub cats of POP Songs:
Madona
Michel Jakcson
Elvis
and son on..

So all these sub cats songs will be displayed in POP Songs category?

IF this is so.. then it will be a big blunder for my site.. if i use sub cat function.

Regards
Tabish

@tabish – blunder or not, thats what will happen, and what should happen.

In your example, if you showed pop songs then it would make sense to show the subcats too because they are still pop songs… the sub cats just narrow down the results when displayed individually.

So basically the code I posted is either the best it can be unless you have a better way of querying sub-categories…

Ill change the patts/match bit in mine though to your $data=str_replace($val[0], $links, $data);

Then thats about it.

Maybe it will be better to find subcats differently. If i queried all cats at once with only 1 query and put them into a variable, this might be quicker. Ill experiment.

Jolly

I have a website, which allows users to download samples papers, and study materials.

For one section, Our download monitor category structure is as follows:

MBA -> School A -> School B -> School 3

You can think about the mistake if it shows all the school’s study material in MBA section while in MBA we have to put MBA fact sheets only and we dont want to display any school’s material on that page.

Anyway.. it’s your plugin.. you do whatever you want. I simply tried to help you.

Bye

Well for that you would have to customise to your needs, but I doubt many would want the change.

By the way, that structure is weird because your basically saying school b is within a – it looks like nesting categories was not needed.

Ill post the fixes. Thank you for the assist.

I agree completely with Mosey. Nothing like using a plugin for purposes it wasn’t *really* designed for and then complaining. Sheesh. Aside from that this is a note to say congratulations on a Great Plugin and it works beautifully on a highly customised WPMU. Nice one jolley_small we love you at least ??