GDE Plugin stopped working

Sorry to hear of this problem.

I was going to suggest you try PDF Embedder – but I see you already are now! That’s great. The advantage of PDF Embedder is that it doesn’t rely on any third party services (i.e. Google).

GDE is great when it works, but it is always possible that Google changes things or has an outage.

Best of luck with the rest of your sites!

Thanks,

Dan

Do you have any suggestion for embedding .docx or .pptx files? GDE did that well and I have a client’s intranet that still needs a solution.

It takes a bit more setup, and you need a Google account, but you should find Google Drive Embedder more reliable and consistent… (And able to display file types other than just PDF.)

It provides a similar viewer, but it just seems Google invest more into it because it is one of their core services under the Google account, whereas the Google Viewer that you’re currently using is entirely ‘anonymous’ – it doesn’t know who it is serving the viewer to, and they don’t seem to worry too much if it breaks.

Again, it will take a bit of time to get started with Google Drive and the other plugins (Google Drive Embedder actually relies on Google Apps Login plugin) if you aren’t already familiar with them.

By the way, once you’ve embedded the files, you need to share them on Google Drive as ‘Anyone with the link can view’. Hopefully that makes sense once you get into it!

For support for those plugins, please email [email protected]. (I may not pick up replies here.)

Thanks,

Dan

I am going to interject here.

I posted a request over 8hrs ago, its still at the top of the list, where I cannot create a new profile and you provided an answer to this request and bypassed mine.

Can you please answer my request now?

Also, I read your replies on this board as the author of this plugin and I see that you keep suggesting another plugin to resolve peoples support requirements regarding your plugin. Why is this?

• This reply was modified 8 years ago by mwarbinek.

If I were to guess at this author’s motivation it’s probably because this is/was a free plugin that he likely made for himself mostly. Without any monetization, there is no reason he has to support the plugin at all. Nobody has paid him anything.

I get that regarding free plugins, yet this support forum exists. The problem I see here is why is he telling everyone to go to another plugin instead of his, which is just updated a few days ago and why did he bypass my request and answer yours? From his standpoint, I am sure that even telling me the same thing as he told you would have been a sufficient answer, yet he never even did that.

So my questions to him still stand. If he wants to promote his plugin, free or not, it would be in his interest to answer here.

• This reply was modified 8 years ago by mwarbinek.

wpwd2016 – Thanks for your comment, but please do understand that maintaining any of these plugins for free is not an easy task.

This forum is really for members of the WordPress community to ask questions of each other, yet of course many maintainers/authors will comment most often.

Please read this plugin’s homepage instructions to understand why it is really in maintenance mode for those that want to use it – the underlying Google service has been unreliable for some time now. It may make sense to discontinue this plugin completely in the near future.

The other plugins I often reference were built as replacements due to the problems people have been having with this one, so I hope that explains further. It is genuinely my best suggestion not to use this plugin in a range of circumstances, and my forum replies will explain why.

Crucially, this particular plugin uses a third party service (Google Viewer) so some issues simply cannot be fixed by modifying the plugin. There really is nothing I can do other than recommend alternatives.

It is important to understand that maintainers of all plugins are ultimately serving the WordPress community, hoping to provide answers to help with their WordPress sites – and if their plugin isn’t right for them then it isn’t as unusual as it seems to point them to other plugins or solutions within WordPress.

Thank you again for bringing this up though – it is a very important point that you raise, and prompts me again to consider whether it makes sense to discontinue this plugin. The problem is that many people were already using it in their sites when I took on the maintenance.

I think that at least I need to stress the level of support/maintenance that can realistically be expected for this plugin.

Hopefully I’ll get a chance to look at your post soon, but please understand I cannot be obligated to do so! I’m not too sure why you think it is reasonable to demand that I do. Maybe another user of the plugin will help if I don’t. Sorry if it appears unfair that some posts are answered quickly but others are not answered at all. It isn’t necessary to use profiles to get the plugin working so that is a reason I felt this particular thread was more important than the question you posed.

Best of luck with your site, and hopefully I am able to answer your forum question soon anyway!

Thanks,

Dan

Thanks Dan.

Your explanation does help and does prevent misunderstandings.

Not surprised that an entity like Google services becomes a service concern, which actually lends to other concerns as well, like linking to their font service which millions of websites do. I have always felt concerned about such dependence on external services to run elements or functions in websites because these services are never permanent, which Google is proving correct.

Self-sustaining websites are still, by far, the best way to go.

Suggest you write a version of your post from here and place it as a sticky at the top of the forum, that would help alert others what is happening and lead to better understanding. ~ Hope that helps.

By the way, I am a member of the WordPress community.

Thanks

• This reply was modified 8 years ago by mwarbinek.
• This reply was modified 8 years ago by mwarbinek.

Thank you for your reply – great that we are on the same page.

Somehow I think the Google Viewer is a bit different to some of the other services such as fonts. A while ago they seem to have removed the ‘front page’ where they previously explained that the service was available and how to use it, so perhaps it’s reasonable to assume it is in wind-down mode at some level. Who knows!

Anyway, I agree it is time to make it even clearer that the plugin is in ‘legacy’ mode really.

Regards,

Dan