Zero Lenght File with CSS optimization

That’s very weird, nothing comes to mind really. Can you check permissions on your CSS-files (and directories in which those live)?

After cleared cache confirming there is no file then refreshed page:

(I shortened file names for easy read.)
File Permission Group Owner Size
cache 775 33 33
cache/autoptimize 775 33 33
cache/autoptimize/XXX.js 664 33 33 137KB (correct)
cache/autoptimize/AAA.css 664 33 33 71B (broken)
cache/autoptimize/BBB.css 664 33 33 0 (broken)

OK, and how about the “source css”-files (i.e. those that autoptimize aggregates)?

I disabled autoptimize, so you can see them with firebug.

I have three sites:
https://www.fortibase.com (autoptimize enabled and works well)
ozum.wpengine.com (autoptimize disabled you can see all css)
murat.wpengine.com (autoptimize enabled without any other plugin, so fewest CSS)

1. can you temporarily disable AO on fortibase.com as well?
2. can you check the rights on the “source css”-files?

1. I disabled AO on frotibase.com
2. I checked theme’s css permissions are 664

On wpengine I temporarily switched to thirteen theme and AO worked for CSS. When I switch back to Kickstart theme it stopped working. But as I told you same theme works on other host.

1. you can switch AO back on on fortibase.com
2. are all autoptimized CSS-files empty on murat.wpengine.com?

up until now I have absolutely no idea what is going on, I’m afraid. The combination of wepengine + kickstart seems to be troubling for AO, but …

I’ll go over the code to see if I can add some extra error-handling in the near future, but you might have to live without CSS optimization on wpengine for now.

No, there are 3 CSS.

2 of them is very short 25 Bytes and 71 bytes with contents below:
1. html{margin-top:28px !important}* html body{margin-top:28px !important}
2. #wpadminbar{display:none}

Those are same in both working and non-working site. So I assume they created correctly.

Third one is zero byte, which should 150-200 KB according to working site.

Thank you for your kind help and for this great plugin.

Benchmarks based on my experiences:
For CSS, I have better results than I have with W3 Total cache. W3TC created more files/requests.
For JS AO created less files/requests than W3TC, but my site didn’t worked well with AO, but woked with W3TC. However I use Cloudflare for JS, because their rocketloader is fascinating.

I trapped the problem in one statement:

I use a child theme. In the child theme’s style.css I call parent theme’s style.css with following standard statement:

@import url(“../kickstart/style.css”);

If I delete @import statement, AO works as expected. This happens only on wpengine.com. In other host, this does not cause any problems.

Given that it works on your other host (and it should, imports are indeed managed in wp-content/plugins/autoptimize/classes/autoptimizeStyles.php starting from line 157, I test with multiple themes, many of which do CSS imports), my gut feeling says must have something to do with rights somehow anyhow …

If you’re familiar with PHP, you could add some debugging in autoptimizeStyles.php to see what is going on, e.g.;

$this->ao_logger("import CSS url: ".$url);

on line 167 or

$this->ao_logger("import CSS path: ".$path);

a couple of lines below. Those debug-calls should create a file in /wp-content, which might help in understanding where things fail?

I’ve just pushed a first test-version of 1.7.2 to the plugin repository. It should fix the CSS-import problem. You can download the test-version here. Looking forward to your feedback!

1.7.2 is now released, hope it fixes the weird zero-length problem on WPEngine.

Dear futtta,

Since I don’t know PHP I cannot test autoptimizeStyles.php.

I tested 1.7.2, and unfortunately 1.7.2 does not solve zero-length problem on WPEngine.

Anyone else having same problem, here is my temporary solution:

I removed @import url(“../kickstart/style.css”); from CSS files and requested that file from PHP generated HTML files like:

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘stylesheet_directory’); ?>/../kickstart/style.css” type=”text/css” />

Although it is not a best practice for WordPress, autoptimize works well with this on wpengine. This problem doesn’t appear on other hosts, so I can live with that solution.

Thanks for the feedback Ozum.

Pretty disappointed the extra checks for import-rules in 1.7.2 did not fix this. No idea what WPengine is so different at WPengine that imports don’t work there (and hence no idea how to solve).

Good to know there is a workaround, thanks for that (I’ll add a reference to it in the FAQ)!

Thank you for your effort.

For your F.A.Q.

I added that line to header.php and some themes have header-xxx.php where xxx is several types of header files. One should add the line below all of the header files and add his/her theme name instead of [THEME FOLDER HERE]

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘stylesheet_directory’); ?>/../[THEME FOLDER HERE]/style.css” type=”text/css” />

Regards,