Wordpress help

Question

I need some help!  I have a website that is Wordpress that is running my design (https://nmfe.webhosting.cals.wisc.edu/) and now it cannot update the file. My college's IT person has tried everything. His email is below but cannot get anything to work.  Below is his response:

Mark Millard resolved incident #1921 Resolution: Not Solved Waiting on the third-party developer to fix their bugs. The following change was made: <!--[if !supportLists]-->·        <!--[endif]-->State changed from assigned to resolved VIEW DETAILS

Was going back through email, and I didn’t see this initially as it wasn’t attached to your original support ticket.

Unfortunately, this is a common response from third-party plugin developers, although it is sometimes true, it results in taking some of the support load off of them because they can just blame another plugin.

That said, I did at least try. I created a fresh new local test wordpress environment on my computer with only that one in5 plugin installed and activated. I also even tried with three different default wordpress themes (2014, 2019, 2021). Anyway, unfortunately I got the same error each time I tried to upload your NFME file. I also looked again at the plugins page, but that developer has not pushed any plugin updates for 5 months, so at this time there is no new plugin update we can try.

You could try going back to them and letting them know that tested was they suggested and still got the error.

Answer 1

I'm sorry that you're having trouble uploading your content to WordPress. Thank you for sending a screenshot of the error message. That error usually indicates that there's a third-party editor, plugin, or theme that is interfering with the in5 WordPress plugin.

You could try the following:

• Use the workaround for uploading content if you use Elementor, Divi Builder or other 3rd-party editors: Is the in5 embed plugin compatible with WordPress editor plugins (e.g., Elementor)?
• Disable other plugins and reupload your content.
• Use a different theme and reupload your content.

If you're still having trouble after trying the above, would you be able to send us a screenshot of the readout from your Console? Here's how you can access the Console in Chrome:

• Right-click
• Select Inspect
• Click on the Console tab

You're welcome to post it here or you can send it to us here:

• https://ajarproductions.com/pages/contact.php?category=in5

Comments

Thanks Myra!  I just got this email back from the IT group:

Hi Mimi,

I mention that I used the wordpress themes developed by wordpress because they also suggested that some themes can cause issues as well, so I wanted to remove our CALS theme as a possible culprit as to why their plugin was not working—thus even using it with different themes it still causes the error.

 

Your question actually prompted a new line of inquiry for me on “what has changed”. Back in November 2022 we completed (along with DoIT) a major upgrade to PHP version 8, which is the underlying language that WordPress runs on. This was a necessary upgrade for performance and security. 

During our pre-upgrade testing we had a number of third-party plugins that caused critical site errors that needed to be fixed by their developers.  Fortunately most developers were aware of this major update to PHP 8, and they updated their plugins if they had issues with PHP 8 errors, some plugins that were abandoned did not, and the plugins had to be removed from our system.  Anyway, This got me thinking that perhaps the in5 plugin was actually incompatible with PHP 8, but just not throwing a typically site critical error.

On my local test wordpress I have the ability to roll back the version of PHP to version 7.x, and my hunch was confirmed.  The plugin worked and uploaded the file when I rolled back the PHP version.  So I can fairly certainly confirm that the plugin is likely having an issue with PHP version 8.  The reason we didn’t notice at first is the way it is throwing the critical error. Typically the plugin will not even activate or run, and will completely bring down a site.  But this one was only causing a critical error on upload.

 

Anyway, I’m fairly confident that is what is causing the issue, having tested it several times toggling PHP version back and forth.  To get this fixed, I would alert the plugin developer that it appears there plugin upload is not working on PHP 8 and hopefully they will push a fix that we can then update on our wordpress platform.

Best,
~Mark

 

 

Mark Millard

Web Services Developer

CALS IT, College of Agricultural and Life Sciences (CALS)

mark.millard@wisc.edu

(he/him)

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Thank you for the update. I checked with Justin, and that could be the issue. He said that he hasn't tested it on PHP8 yet.

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Thanks Myra!  Hopefully, Justin can get this tested and maybe have a new version of the plug-in available soon.  For now, I am stuck in the version of the file I have uploaded.  Our entire campus IT at University of Wisconsin-Madison upgraded to PHP8 so at the college level, we have no control over these issues.  It is obvious now that when they did the conversion, although the plug-in didn't throw an error at the time, it is not compatible with the current system the UW is running. Can you make sure that I get notified when something becomes available?  Thanks, Mimi

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Hi Mimi, I've made a note to notify you with updates regarding the in5 WordPress plugin.

In the meantime, you may want to use the old way of embedding your in5-exported content into WordPress that doesn't require using the in5 WordPress Plugin (from https://ajarproductions.com/blog/2017/04/10/instant-publishing-from-indesign-and-in5-with-wordpress-plugin/):

The Old Way

Before this new plugin, the process to include in5 (or any) HTML content on your WordPress posts would involve the following steps.

1. Upload the HTML to a web server and copy the address.
2. In the WordPress post editor, switch to Text (code) view.
3. Insert manually created <iframe> code that points to the address of the file posted via FTP.
4. Look up the height and width of your document and adjust the <iframe> code as needed, adding manual CSS styling.

This isn’t terrible, but it does involve 1) using an FTP client, and 2) writing some HTML.