How to *completely* reset Zotpress

By the way, I’m working with a just-created Zotero repo, with one group, and just one bibliographic entry. I’m confident I’ve created and entered the app id and key correctly.

I sent you an email yesterday with some ideas — did you get it?

Katie,

Pardon me. Yes, you did reply. Thank you. Thanks for confirming that uninstall deletes everything. Not sure where to go from here. It’s working on another site of mine. If you have any suggestions for debugging, I’m open. E.g., what line of code might I add to my local zotpress install to write something to the screen or to a log so that I can see that, e.g., the code for adding an account is even being called.

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Hi Kevin

Zotpress should uninstall everything. I think there might be something else going on. “Browse” only shows the top-level items in your library. If you’re not using Collections, then everything should be loaded there. It can take several minutes depending on the size of your library; at the bottom, there should be more pages added as it loads. If you want to display items associated with a tag, then use the attribute tag=”the+tag+name” where spaces are plus signs.

Best,
Katie

If it’s working on another site, then I suspect it’s a server issue. There’s a pinned thread in the main forum where some ideas and fixes are provided. Check that out. If that doesn’t work, you could set up a temporary editor account and I can take a look when I get a free moment.

Ok, more information. One problem is that while Zotpress is creating tables for site 1, the main site, on my multi-site set-up, it’s not creating its tables when I activate or use the plug-in on a sub-site. So it’s at least 1/2 working on the main site, but not at all on the sub-site. And the WordPress debug.log file confirms that the error when I try to add an account on the subsite is that the tables for the subsite (wp_6_zotpress, etc) are missing, the subsite being site 6.

I’ve completed deleted and reinstalled the plugin, and it consistently (1) creates tables for site=1, and (2) refuses to create tables for site=6, whether I activate network-wide and just try to use it on site=6, or whether I install it and activate it on site=6. Even the latter fails to create the required tables.

So the problem with zotpress working on my main site and not on my subsite was that, in fact, there *was* more state left behind when I tried to clean out my installation entirely. Dropping the wp_zotpress* tables was *not* enough. The reason is that there are four entries in the wp_options table (and in the wp_<n>_options table for each subsite) with version information about each of the four tables zotpress creates. When I deleted all the tables, those entries in “options” were left behind. And, wouldn’t you know it, the code to create tables skips table creation if those entries indicate up-to-date table structures.

So that was that problem.

Once that was solved, I re-installed the plug-in and activated on my subsite. No go. So I deactivated and deleted the plug-in. Discover: Deleting the plugin does remove tables from the main site, but *not* from the sub-sites. I left those tables in place, added the plug-in, activated on the main site (network activation) and now, finally, I have a *half* working install on my sub-site, where I need it.

There are two remaining problems. The javascript acknowledgements of various actions, such as validating an account, deleting an account, creating and account, setting one of the accounts to default, etc. is still not working. The actions are actually being carried out, but for some reason not yet determined the nice javascripty messages and page updates aren’t working. Browser “console” window shows an error message about there being white space before XML data. Not sure if that’s relevant.

I’d also note that sometimes when I add a citation to my zotero database, sync from zotero online to zotpress just stops working (spinning wheel). I really have no idea what specific conditions trigger this problem. Deleting the entries from Zotero (stand alone), then syncing to Zotero (online), and finally resynching to zotpress so far has cleared up the problem. These are simple bib entries, to which, at least sometimes, I’ve added a PDF “underneath”. I don’t know if that’s relevant.

Last point: There seems to be latency between the time when Zotero online updates and when doing a sync in Zotpress actually pulls in the most recent additions. I’m not sure if the “problem” here is that the Zotero web page and the Zotero API are out of sync, or if Zotpress is somehow deciding not to pull in the most recent posts immediately. It’s usually some tens or more of seconds, and several tries, before Zotpress pulls down the most recent uploads. Would be good to know why.