Andy Giesler

Great tip @nfong. Somehow I missed that WordPress announcement about built-in sitemap support.

I’ve removed Google XML Sitemaps from all the sites I manage, and I don’t plan to replace it with another specialized sitemap plugin. My reasoning:

• There are questions around how important XML sitemaps are for SEO with small to medium sites that have good internal linking. All my sites fall into that category.
• WordPress includes XML sitemap support as of 5.5.
• If I ever need finer control (for example, to hide certain post types or category types), the plugin @nfong mentioned provides that, as do several popular generalized plugins that bundle an XML sitemap feature.

I’ll leave this topic open for a little longer in the hope that someone can definitively clarify what’s going on…but I’m done worrying about it.

I contacted Arne Brachold through his website asking him to confirm that he handed over support to w3edge, and asking whether he was aware of the current situation. He replied:

“That is correct, I’m no longer affiliated with the plugin for quite some time.”

Using the link from his site to w3edge, I used their contact form to reach out to them. Their contact form dropdown only lists options for W3 Total Cache support. They replied:

“As you can see from the form on the website, this is a contact form exclusively for the W3 Total Cache plugin. We are not offering any support for the mentioned plugin and I do not have any information that we actually took over this project. This being said, I am sorry, however, I am unable to assist you with this.”

So it’s unclear to me who’s maintaining the plugin, or who recently submitted an update for it (including renaming the plugin).

I’ve contacted both W3-Edge and Arne Brachold to see whether they can shed any light on the situation.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 7 months ago by Andy Giesler.

The comment from @fmosse about hacked sites was enough to make me temporarily remove the plugin out of an abundance of caution. Note that I only had it installed on five sites, and none of them change page structure often enough for the plugin to be critical, so this wasn’t a big decision for me.

I’m deleting it rather than deactivating. In some cases, a security vulnerability can remain even when the plugin is deactivated. I have no idea whether that would be true in this case — again, just erring on the site of over-caution, and this doesn’t affect many of my sites.

Wish I could help more, but I’ve reached the limit of my time to investigate. Since we reverted to PHP 5 three weeks ago we haven’t had the error. So to investigate further, I have to reconfigure the site for PHP7 (and in doing so, break it).

I’ll mark this thread as resolved since you can’t reproduce it. But please keep it in mind in case others report similar problems.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by Andy Giesler.

Never mind, I see my post now. I guess it just disappeared temporarily while the edit was processing.

Thanks. I posted a detailed reply to that post and it appeared. Then I made a small edit and it disappeared. Now I’m unable to make any reply to that post.

Maybe I’m confused about post-editing mechanics in this forum. Are you able to see the diagnostics I gave in the other post?

Thanks for checking in. We currently have only 6 events.

At the time of the problems, I didn’t enable plugins one-by-one for testing. But this morning I spent an hour or so testing in case it helps you find the error. We have no problem right now because we can downgrade to PHP 5.6. But if you have a customer sometime who must use PHP 7, they might get into a more pressing situation.

Results were strange.

To check for the problem, I leave the page editor open for a test page and just do a browser refresh (F5).

• Sometimes the error happens immediately.
• Sometimes I need to update the page two or three times.

There are four different kinds of errors.

1. A memory error like the one I mentioned.
2. “Fatal error: in [accountpath]/wp-content/plugins/the-events-calendar/src/Tribe/Asset/Factory.php on line 3”
3. The page editor loads, but styles seem to be broken. Text in the content area is white on a white background, monospace font.
4. White screen of death. WP_DEBUG is enabled, but no error message shows. When I view source, I see that the page abruptly stops generating in the head block in the middle of a Fusion Builder script block: type=”text/template” id=”fusion-builder-block-module-settings-table-template”.

First, the straightforward part:

1. Revert to PHP 7.0. Error.
2. Disable all plugins, switch to Tewnty Fifteen. NO error.
3. Enable Fusion Core, Fusion Builder, Events Calendar, and then switch to Avada. NO error.

Then I started enabling additional plugins, leaving that core enabled (Fusion Core, Fusion Builder, Events Calendar).

The weird part: errors start happening when I enable 2-3 other plugins. And not 2-3 particular plugins, but seemingly any 2-3 plugins. I confirmed with with several combinations of plugins, including completely non-overlapping subsets.

In other words, it’s not like Events Calendar + one particular other plugin causes the error. If we imagine my plugins have letters for names:

• enabling A = ok
• enabling B = ok
• enabling A+B = error
• enabling C = ok
• enabling D = ok
• enabling C+D = error

Reverting to PHP 5.6 ends the errors, even with a dozen plugins enabled.

So it sure seems like some combination of Avada, Events Calendar, and PHP 7 are causing some fragility in the WordPress instance, making errors more likely as additional plugins try to add more functionality.

I’m also experiencing a problem under PHP 7 and have raised a new support topic.

It seems fairly clear this is a PHP 7 issue, at least in my case:

– disabling the plugin fixes the crash under PHP 7
– downgrading to PHP 5.6 fixes the crash with the plugin enabled
– the system is trying to allocate 2.5 terabytes of memory, and no host would be reasonably expected to allocate that

No need to reply to me here. I just wanted to link the two topics in case other people find this one and are having PHP 7 problems.

Thanks for the quick reply, and for all your good work for the WP community. Longtime fan of Digging Into WordPress and your other work. (I just realized I haven’t reviewed BBQ — fixed that.)

You rock.

I know the plugin’s author has moved on to other things, but Mike if you’re reading this–it would be awesome if you could add this solution to the FAQ. I’ve seen postings about this problem scattered around the web.

I had this problem with both Google Maps and embedded Vimeo videos, so I modified the code as follows:

add_filter('http_external_url', 'wccn_http_external_url');
function wccn_http_external_url ($url) {
  if (
        ( preg_match( '/www\.google\.com\/maps\//i', $url ) ) ||
        ( preg_match( '/player\.vimeo\.com\/video\//i', $url ) )
     )
  {
    $url = str_replace('https://', 'https://', $url);
  }

  return $url;
}

Ah! I see now. Thanks for explaining.

Thanks for the quick reply.

It depends on the browser and the network. Some automatically redirect me to https, and for others OpenDNS still warns that it’s an untrustworthy site. But if I use my iPhone over cellular data, I’m able to reach the site with “http”.

But I think I was confused by the settings screen. When I saw the blank screen with just two options, and one of them asking for a consumer key, I assumed I had to visit the 500px website to get a consumer key before I could use FakerPress. It looks like I can use the app without doing that.

What is the “consumer key” field for, and how does it relate to 500px.com?

It might be worth clarifying that briefly on the settings screen, especially since some browsers and content filters have flagged 500px.com as an untrustworthy site. When I saw that problem, my first concern was that FakerPress might be malicious in some way. It would be unfortunate if 500px’s problems ended up making people concerned about your plugin.

In case others have the same problem as me:

When I checked “Expand shortcodes”, search results reflected the generated content of shortcodes as expected. But excerpts in the search results still showed the text of the unexpanded shortcodes. This was true whether or not “Custom excerpts” was checked.

The problem was that the theme was poorly coded: to produce an excerpt it simply truncated get_the_content. In a child theme I overrode this to use the_excerpt() as suggested by Relevanssi’s settings page, and all works as expected.

Thanks again for the great support and great plugin.

Ah — I just found the “Expand Shortcodes” setting, but it doesn’t seem to do what I’d expect. I’ll post a question about that separately since it’s an unrelated issue.