Conversation
supportWe’ve been gratefully using this plugin since it was first released. But since the update this week, the Drive documents no longer transfer from the designated origin folder. We’re connected to the App fine, and the folder IDs are correct on the Docs to WP settings page. Updated the main plug-in, which seems to have also updated the other three separate plug-ins listed on our plug-in admin page to 1.0 Beta — “Docs to WordPress extender – clean content, strip comments,” “Docs to WordPress extender – Headline delimiter” and “Docs to WordPress extender – Run on Cron (every minute)” Checked and there is no “DEFINE disable cron” statement in our wp-config.php file, so I’m not sure why nothing’s moving, and any hints about troubleshooting would be appreciated. Also, separate issue: Activating the Docs to WP plug-in also seems to break some of the Ajax features of other plug-ins on the admin side, specifically of an Event Calendar Pro date-picker and the Authors Plus multiple author chooser; wondering if there’s a jquery conflict happening somewhere, but again any hints about troubleshooting appreciated. Thanks, Roger https://wordpress.org/plugins/docs-to-wordpress/
One issue I’ve run into was activating the plugin with the wrong account. If the account used to grant offline access doesn’t have the necessary permissions to read, write and move files, it will appear as if the API is connected, but it will fail when it tries to do anything, since Google doesn’t tell us it’s a permissions error, it just returns an empty list of files. As for the ajax issues, I’m not sure what could be causing that. It’s possibly a jQuery thing, as you mentioned, but I wouldn’t know without digging into it deeper. Does the issue happen across the entire admin dashboard, or only while in the Docs To WP options page?
Thanks for the quick response. Offline access was granted with the same account we’ve been using all along, which is the same account I used to create the App, for which the Drive API is activated. Hmm. I would like to test with a “real” cron job and the installation notes do say what to put in a cron file but I am not a real coder so . . . not sure where that file goes (wp install root?) or how to get the server to execute it. That probably be my problem, not yours, but any pointers appreciated. Tha ajax issue seems to be across the admin dashboard (calendar thing is on the admin new/edit Event, a custom post type created by the ECP plug-in; the other authors thing is on any admin panel that contains the Authors-Plus field, which is basically an enhanced version of the Author field). Relative to the transfer issue, though, it’s a minor thing. We’re a weekly paper and do the transfers about once a week, so I can deactivate Docs to WP while we’re entering events. Thanks again for getting back.
I don’t believe it’s a jQuery conflict, since we only enqueue jQuery on the options page. As for the cron, the script is very simple: <?php include('./wp-load.php'); $d2w = new Docs_To_WP(); $d2w->startTransfer(); Place that code in a file in your root WordPress directory, and then setup the Cron to cURL that page as frequently as you’d like. You’d have to figure that out, as each system is different, but the code I’ve put above should work, as it’s what we use in-house. I mentioned in another support post that we’re working on a better debugging system, but until that’s finished, we have very little to go on, which is upsetting. Question for you: Would a button in the Options page to manually pull down the posts be useful to you, since you only transfer once a week?
Thread jack… A button to transfer would be useful for me. I run 8 monthlies. I wonder if there’s a way to do that integrating a real cron. For whatever reason my hosting plan causes a timeout on the cron plugin. Not at all a necessary feature, but very cool that you’d think to add that for us slowpokes. @piantadosi – I’m not a coder either, so I also freaked out at the prospect. I just used TextEdit to create a file and pasted in that code. Name it something obvious like ‘pullmygoogledocs.php’ or something. Our hosting panel actually has something called Cron Job Manager, so hopefully yours will have something similar. From there it has a button to ‘Create Cron Job’ and in the setup you give it a name and navigate to the PHP file you put in the root directory. Ours options to run it once an hour on a five minute interval. Hope that was helpful.
Until a button is decided on, if you use the code above you can load it from your browser manually to get the same effect, so basically load it, book mark it, and then open it when you want things to transfer over. @tararebeka : On our GitHub I have been planning some future updates in the issues section. If you’re interested in voicing your opinion, I’d love to get your input.
@anubisthejackle — thanks for the cron code and tips, and definitely a Yes vote here on the transfer button. @tararebeka — as usual, I forgot that I actually had created a cron job before via the control panel, so with your help I found it again. thanks. will be trying the new script momentarily. so, did you get the update working? (I saw in your other thread that you were going back a version, but I thought the old version only works with the now-defunct Docs API.)
@piantadosi : What version of PHP does your webserver have?
5.4.36
Ok, that should be up to date enough. I’m still unsure why it appears that the two plugins are conflicting. To verify that your issue is actually fixed, can you visit the cron PHP file from your browser and verify that the posts are actually being pulled in?
Not as of yet. He’s updating some of the PHP code from anonymous functions, which was causing an error. Mentioned the update will hit tonight or tomorrow. And the old version seems to still be working fine for me. I had reverted and was testing it yesterday. I’ll be glad when the new version is working, because I’m always terrified that Google will change something that’ll break everything. It wasn’t such a big deal when I was doing one our smaller papers for a year to show the advantages of WordPress, but now that all eight of our papers our using this setup – well, I sweat bullets when things change. Big, fat, bullets!
Well I’m glad Google hasn’t pulled the plug just yet. Their email seemed to imply it was a 4/20/2015 end of life date.
@anubisthejackle — not working. new cron job is active, and the browser method doesn’t seem to work either. you think it would it do any good to delete the old App at Google and create a new one?
As long as the options page says Connected, the App details are fine. I’m guessing this is more to do with a PHP / WordPress issue.
@piantadosi There should be an error log in your cPanel. Could you check that to see if PHP is throwing an error when it runs? Also, try removing and reinstalling the plugin, I made some minor updates to it, which I haven’t pushed a dot version update for, but they’re present in the current download of the plugin.
@anubisthejackle — no PHP errors in the log. no errors at all since reactivating the plug-in. (most recent entry looks like it was three hours ago and does not seem related). just thought something really stupid — would an htaccess ban on IP addresses to /wp-admin/anything be the problem? (we were attacked not long ago by some friendly russian hacking students). if so i’m happy to feel like an idiot and go fix it before i re-download the plugin.
It would only affect it if you placed the cron file in that location. Also, if you did, it wouldn’t work anyway as I’d written it. It needs to be place in the same folder as wp-load.php, so it can grab ALL THE WORDPRESS THINGS without loading the actual wordpress. To verify that it’s working, add echo "It works"; as the very last line of the cron file, and see if it loads when you visit the cron file in your browser.
No, the cron file is in the WP root, and the browser shows the “It works” echo. Going to remove and reinstall the plugin.
Removing and reinstalling seems to have worked. We are transferring documents again! @anubisthejackle — thanks for sticking with this. The ajax issue seems to also have gone away. However, it doesn’t seem to be transferring character attributes (bold, italic, etc.) to WP, and it’s also not picking up categories or authors the way it used to (matching GD folders with WP categories and authors whose Google email before the @ sign matches their WP username, etc.) — a few of the excellent reasons to give up copying and pasting for Docs to WP in the first place. correct h1-5, li and p formatting is coming through.
It’s possible that I will fix those with my dot update this weekend. I’ll try to get that out ASAP. Hopefully tonight, or early tomorrow. If not early tomorrow it’ll be sunday, as I’ll be celebrating my birthday later in the day Saturday. Glad to hear you’re back up and running, even if it’s only at a hobbled state, currently. Re: the folders, I came into this project late in the game (read: a couple weeks ago) and never actually saw the previous versions up and running. Did they navigate into sub-folders? This current version doesn’t, but it’s on my to-do list .
Hey thank you again very much. We use a simple folder structure (Future, Edit, Print, Images) on Drive for our print workflow. So we don’t add docs to the category-matching folders until they’re ready to go to WP (and those folders are all contained in a top-level folder called “Categories”). So I guess the answer to the question about subfolders is yes (since all the category names are subfolders of the “Category” folder). If you meant folders on the WordPress side, it doesn’t seem to matter if the folder is a child or parent as long as the name is an exact match for the folder in GD. Hope that helps. And happy birthday. Roger
I’ll make that a priority for the next release than.
One issue I’ve run into was activating the plugin with the wrong account. If the account used to grant offline access doesn’t have the necessary permissions to read, write and move files, it will appear as if the API is connected, but it will fail when it tries to do anything, since Google doesn’t tell us it’s a permissions error, it just returns an empty list of files. As for the ajax issues, I’m not sure what could be causing that. It’s possibly a jQuery thing, as you mentioned, but I wouldn’t know without digging into it deeper. Does the issue happen across the entire admin dashboard, or only while in the Docs To WP options page?
Thanks for the quick response. Offline access was granted with the same account we’ve been using all along, which is the same account I used to create the App, for which the Drive API is activated. Hmm. I would like to test with a “real” cron job and the installation notes do say what to put in a cron file but I am not a real coder so . . . not sure where that file goes (wp install root?) or how to get the server to execute it. That probably be my problem, not yours, but any pointers appreciated. Tha ajax issue seems to be across the admin dashboard (calendar thing is on the admin new/edit Event, a custom post type created by the ECP plug-in; the other authors thing is on any admin panel that contains the Authors-Plus field, which is basically an enhanced version of the Author field). Relative to the transfer issue, though, it’s a minor thing. We’re a weekly paper and do the transfers about once a week, so I can deactivate Docs to WP while we’re entering events. Thanks again for getting back.
I don’t believe it’s a jQuery conflict, since we only enqueue jQuery on the options page. As for the cron, the script is very simple: <?php include('./wp-load.php'); $d2w = new Docs_To_WP(); $d2w->startTransfer(); Place that code in a file in your root WordPress directory, and then setup the Cron to cURL that page as frequently as you’d like. You’d have to figure that out, as each system is different, but the code I’ve put above should work, as it’s what we use in-house. I mentioned in another support post that we’re working on a better debugging system, but until that’s finished, we have very little to go on, which is upsetting. Question for you: Would a button in the Options page to manually pull down the posts be useful to you, since you only transfer once a week?
Thread jack… A button to transfer would be useful for me. I run 8 monthlies. I wonder if there’s a way to do that integrating a real cron. For whatever reason my hosting plan causes a timeout on the cron plugin. Not at all a necessary feature, but very cool that you’d think to add that for us slowpokes. @piantadosi – I’m not a coder either, so I also freaked out at the prospect. I just used TextEdit to create a file and pasted in that code. Name it something obvious like ‘pullmygoogledocs.php’ or something. Our hosting panel actually has something called Cron Job Manager, so hopefully yours will have something similar. From there it has a button to ‘Create Cron Job’ and in the setup you give it a name and navigate to the PHP file you put in the root directory. Ours options to run it once an hour on a five minute interval. Hope that was helpful.
Until a button is decided on, if you use the code above you can load it from your browser manually to get the same effect, so basically load it, book mark it, and then open it when you want things to transfer over. @tararebeka : On our GitHub I have been planning some future updates in the issues section. If you’re interested in voicing your opinion, I’d love to get your input.
@anubisthejackle — thanks for the cron code and tips, and definitely a Yes vote here on the transfer button. @tararebeka — as usual, I forgot that I actually had created a cron job before via the control panel, so with your help I found it again. thanks. will be trying the new script momentarily. so, did you get the update working? (I saw in your other thread that you were going back a version, but I thought the old version only works with the now-defunct Docs API.)
@piantadosi : What version of PHP does your webserver have?
5.4.36
Ok, that should be up to date enough. I’m still unsure why it appears that the two plugins are conflicting. To verify that your issue is actually fixed, can you visit the cron PHP file from your browser and verify that the posts are actually being pulled in?
Not as of yet. He’s updating some of the PHP code from anonymous functions, which was causing an error. Mentioned the update will hit tonight or tomorrow. And the old version seems to still be working fine for me. I had reverted and was testing it yesterday. I’ll be glad when the new version is working, because I’m always terrified that Google will change something that’ll break everything. It wasn’t such a big deal when I was doing one our smaller papers for a year to show the advantages of WordPress, but now that all eight of our papers our using this setup – well, I sweat bullets when things change. Big, fat, bullets!
Well I’m glad Google hasn’t pulled the plug just yet. Their email seemed to imply it was a 4/20/2015 end of life date.
@anubisthejackle — not working. new cron job is active, and the browser method doesn’t seem to work either. you think it would it do any good to delete the old App at Google and create a new one?
As long as the options page says Connected, the App details are fine. I’m guessing this is more to do with a PHP / WordPress issue.
@piantadosi There should be an error log in your cPanel. Could you check that to see if PHP is throwing an error when it runs? Also, try removing and reinstalling the plugin, I made some minor updates to it, which I haven’t pushed a dot version update for, but they’re present in the current download of the plugin.
@anubisthejackle — no PHP errors in the log. no errors at all since reactivating the plug-in. (most recent entry looks like it was three hours ago and does not seem related). just thought something really stupid — would an htaccess ban on IP addresses to /wp-admin/anything be the problem? (we were attacked not long ago by some friendly russian hacking students). if so i’m happy to feel like an idiot and go fix it before i re-download the plugin.
It would only affect it if you placed the cron file in that location. Also, if you did, it wouldn’t work anyway as I’d written it. It needs to be place in the same folder as wp-load.php, so it can grab ALL THE WORDPRESS THINGS without loading the actual wordpress. To verify that it’s working, add echo "It works"; as the very last line of the cron file, and see if it loads when you visit the cron file in your browser.
No, the cron file is in the WP root, and the browser shows the “It works” echo. Going to remove and reinstall the plugin.
Removing and reinstalling seems to have worked. We are transferring documents again! @anubisthejackle — thanks for sticking with this. The ajax issue seems to also have gone away. However, it doesn’t seem to be transferring character attributes (bold, italic, etc.) to WP, and it’s also not picking up categories or authors the way it used to (matching GD folders with WP categories and authors whose Google email before the @ sign matches their WP username, etc.) — a few of the excellent reasons to give up copying and pasting for Docs to WP in the first place. correct h1-5, li and p formatting is coming through.
It’s possible that I will fix those with my dot update this weekend. I’ll try to get that out ASAP. Hopefully tonight, or early tomorrow. If not early tomorrow it’ll be sunday, as I’ll be celebrating my birthday later in the day Saturday. Glad to hear you’re back up and running, even if it’s only at a hobbled state, currently. Re: the folders, I came into this project late in the game (read: a couple weeks ago) and never actually saw the previous versions up and running. Did they navigate into sub-folders? This current version doesn’t, but it’s on my to-do list .
Hey thank you again very much. We use a simple folder structure (Future, Edit, Print, Images) on Drive for our print workflow. So we don’t add docs to the category-matching folders until they’re ready to go to WP (and those folders are all contained in a top-level folder called “Categories”). So I guess the answer to the question about subfolders is yes (since all the category names are subfolders of the “Category” folder). If you meant folders on the WordPress side, it doesn’t seem to matter if the folder is a child or parent as long as the name is an exact match for the folder in GD. Hope that helps. And happy birthday. Roger
I’ll make that a priority for the next release than.