Setup routines seem to be faulty

Thanks for your feedback, and yes there is always work to do making the plugin compatible with all the different server configurations people use (of course, these things work fine in my tests) and try to anticipate problems with the code.

I will take a look at the site demo for problems, but it normally doesn’t retain data that is entered, the database is reset every few minutes. The plugin doesn’t do that of course!

If you want help with something specific in the plugin, let me know.

Well, I would really like to start testing the plugin, but I think you will agree, as long as there is an install issue, and probably some more issues arising from that (e.g. some image file that is referenced in your setup not being installed), I’d rather wait for a clean install.
I am now waiting for you to tell me the error has been found, install it again or whatever, and then I would continue testing. And if the plugin works properly, I would also offer you a complete German translation for free.

In some cases, you will need to create this directory yourself. This will probably solve the problem much more quickly than waiting for me to come up with a fix.

In the majority of cases, it’s working, which means it will be difficult to replicate the specific issue you are seeing in order to test and improve it.

Just tried to deinstall the plugin in order to prepare a clean install.
This is not possible at all. Here is the error log from the Apache server:

[Fri Nov 10 23:26:36.297943 2023] [php7:error] [pid 31728] [client 90.187.31.177:0] PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Undefined class constant ‘attribute_store’ in /data/web/joh.bsoft.de/wp-content/plugins/participants-database/classes/PDb_Init.php:344\nStack trace:\n#0 /data/web/joh.bsoft.de/wp-content/plugins/participants-database/classes/PDb_Init.php(53): PDb_Init->_uninstall()\n#1 /data/web/joh.bsoft.de/wp-content/plugins/participants-database/classes/PDb_Init.php(95): PDb_Init->__construct()\n#2 /data/web/joh.bsoft.de/wp-includes/class-wp-hook.php(324): PDb_Init::on_uninstall()\n#3 /data/web/joh.bsoft.de/wp-includes/class-wp-hook.php(348): WP_Hook->apply_filters()\n#4 /data/web/joh.bsoft.de/wp-includes/plugin.php(517): WP_Hook->do_action()\n#5 /data/web/joh.bsoft.de/wp-admin/includes/plugin.php(1269): do_action()\n#6 /data/web/joh.bsoft.de/wp-admin/includes/plugin.php(960): uninstall_plugin()\n#7 /data/web/joh.bsoft.de/wp-admin/includes/ajax-actions.php(4748): delete_plugins()\n#8 /data/web/joh.bsoft.de/wp-includes/class-wp-hook.php(324): wp_ajax_delete_plugin()\n#9 /data/web/joh.bsoft.de/wp-includes/class-wp-hook. in /data/web/joh.bsoft.de/wp-content/plugins/participants-database/classes/PDb_Init.php on line 344, referer: https://joh.bsoft.de/wp-admin/plugins.php?plugin_status=all&paged=1&s

Hope this helps

Thanks, yes, I’m aware of this isuue and the new update (2.5.5) fixes it.

You’ll need to update then delete (for a clean install) or manually delete the plugin from the plugins directory and install from a fresh download.

After updating to 2.5.5 deinstall works fine. I deinstalled the old version completely, and afterwards installed 2.5.5 from the scratch. Still, the install routine does not create any subdir below the uploads folder, and still, the error message because of wrong permissions is there later on:
The configured uploads directory “/data/web/joh.bsoft.de/wp-content/uploads/participants-database/” for Participants Database is not writable.”
That message shows, although in the meantime I manually created a directory at exactly that location, with the appropriate settings (0775). So what?

If the message that the directory isn’t writable appears, but the directory does exist, it can be because the plugin isn’t getting the correct path to the install root directory. (this also explains why the directory isn’t created).

One way to possibly fix this is to use WordPress’ content directory path global value. You can do this by checking the “File and Image Uploads Use WP Content Path” setting in the plugin settings under the Advanced tab. Then, go back to the “File Upload Location” setting (General tab) and remove the “wp-content/” portion of the setting.

I found that the error message will be displayed again and again (even if the error no longer exists), as long as it is not explicitly deleted from the screen. In fact, if the error persists, there is an additional error message, and on and on. I finally started wondering when there were four of those messages. So, actually there is no problem for the plugin to find the path, if it really exists.
I then had a closer look at the source code, and I am pretty sure that the function which creates the upload directory (“_make_uploads_dir”) is not called during install at all. There is a special error message in there which I should have seen if anything went wrong. (But I didn’t.)
Afterwards I tested the debug mode because I found that same function is part of the PDb_Debug class. It IS called immediately after saving the debug mode setting, and the directory was created without any hassle. For people that encounter the same problem and do not have direct access to the server’s file system this could be a workaround.
As for me, this thread can be closed, although I would not really call it resolved right now. Thank you, anyway, for your quick feedback, which has helped me a lot with troubleshooting.

Thanks for your analysis, this is helpful, and you’re correct, the directory is only created when needed. It is also used to store the plugin debugging log.

I clearly need to investigate and fix the error messaging, a persistent error message is a nuisance for eveyone.