Robin North

Hey Zach,

Not a problem, I’m happy to be able to help out — thanks for developing the plugin in the first place!

Hi Zach,

In addition to the above, the reason you haven’t seen this happening on your local test install is likely because it seems from your screenshots that you’re examining the generated source of the page with your browser’s developer tools. As the additional DTD, head and body tags that are output by the plugin are invalid HTML in the context in which they appear (nested inside another body element), your browser will disregard them and thus they do not appear in the generated source.

If you view the original source of the page that is output by WordPress, I imagine you will see this invalid markup for yourself.

I noticed I was experiencing this issue today on two WordPress installs running 4.4.2 on PHP 5.4.17 and 5.6.10 respectively.

DOMDocument::loadHTML would appear to add DTD, head and body tags if they’re missing from the HTML string you attempt to load. There’s a variety of suggestions of how to work around this to just return the desired HTML fragment when using DOMDocument::saveHTML — see https://php.net/manual/en/domdocument.savehtml.php#85165 and https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11216726/php-domdocument-without-the-dtd-head-and-body-tags.

I’ve implemented the simplest solution that is compatible with PHP < 5.3.6 and submitted a pull request on GitHub for you: https://github.com/zachwills/wp-menu-section-titles/pull/1

Unfortunately, I’m still having this issue with 1.2.1. I can’t see from the plugin code how you’ve tried to work around the issue, am I missing something obvious?

I’ve patched my copy with the refactored code I posted previously, which I can confirm as working with 1.2.1.

Refactored my refactored code to only prevent disabling of the category the current post is stickied in, and to be a bit more concise:

/**
 * Renders the select box that allows users to choose the category into which to stick the
 * specified post.
 *
 * @param	$post	The post to be marked as sticky for the specified category.
 */
function category_sticky_post_display( $post ) {

	// Set the nonce for security
	wp_nonce_field( plugin_basename( __FILE__ ), 'category_sticky_post_nonce' );

	// First, read all the categories
	$categories = get_categories();

	// Get the current sticky category for the post, if any
	$post_sticky_category = get_post_meta( $post->ID, 'category_sticky_post', true );

	// Build the HTML that will display the select box
	$html = '<select id="category_sticky_post" name="category_sticky_post">';
		$html .= '<option value="0">' . __( 'Select a category...', 'category-sticky-post' ) . '</option>';
		foreach( $categories as $category ) {
			$html .= '<option value="' . $category->cat_ID . '" ' . selected( $post_sticky_category, $category->cat_ID, false ) . ( ( $this->category_has_sticky_post( $category->cat_ID ) && $post_sticky_category !== $category->cat_ID ) ? ' disabled ' : '' ) . '>';
				$html .= $category->cat_name;
			$html .= '</option>';
		} // end foreach
	$html .= '</select>';

	echo $html;

} // end category_sticky_post_display

Have debugged this and found that because the plugin enforces a single sticky post per category by means of adding the disabled attribute to the currently-assigned sticky category in the Sticky Category select menu, updating a post with a sticky category assigned will result in the sticky category custom post meta data being cleared, as disabled select option values are not added to the $_POST array when a form is POSTed in PHP.

To solve this, I’ve refactored category_sticky_post_display to only add the disabled attribute when a category currently has a sticky post and that post is not the one currently being edited.

Here’s the code:

/**
 * Renders the select box that allows users to choose the category into which to stick the
 * specified post.
 *
 * @param	$post	The post to be marked as sticky for the specified category.
 */
function category_sticky_post_display( $post ) {

	// Set the nonce for security
	wp_nonce_field( plugin_basename( __FILE__ ), 'category_sticky_post_nonce' );

	// First, read all the categories
	$categories = get_categories();

	// Build the HTML that will display the select box
	$html = '<select id="category_sticky_post" name="category_sticky_post">';
		$html .= '<option value="0">' . __( 'Select a category...', 'category-sticky-post' ) . '</option>';
		foreach( $categories as $category ) {
			$html .= '<option value="' . $category->cat_ID . '" ' . selected( get_post_meta( $post->ID, 'category_sticky_post', true ), $category->cat_ID, false ) . ( ( $this->category_has_sticky_post( $category->cat_ID ) && ! get_post_meta( $post->ID, 'category_sticky_post', true ) ) ? ' disabled ' : '' ) . '>';
				$html .= $category->cat_name;
			$html .= '</option>';
		} // end foreach
	$html .= '</select>';

	echo $html;

} // end category_sticky_post_display

Additionally, the delete_post_meta call can be removed from save_category_sticky_post_data, as update_post_meta will not add extra rows to the wp_postmeta table if the post already has a post meta object with the same key.

I’m also experiencing this issue and would also like to see what can be done about it, cheers!