[Plugin: Query Wrangler] Interface not working

@daggerhart

Loving this plugin, have same error as Daedalon. (WP 3.5) Clicking on Display Title: None or any other setting results in javascript error:
ReferenceError: jQuery is not defined

I think jQuery isn’t available when you load the scripts for QW. Perhaps try putting them in the footer?

With my last update I was trying to by pass WP’s jquery and jquery ui versions completely (only on the QW admin page).

It may be the case that you’re dealing with local cache issue, or I made a mistake in my commit. Could I trouble you to look at the source on the QW edit page and see if jquery and jquery-ui are linked to google hosted versions?

Chances are it’s not working because crf1964 tried a fresh install. If it doesn’t work, his post also implies that enabling the Use Google Libraries 1.5 module fixes the problem for the interim.

I’ll take another shot at it next year and try to get this fixed.

Just a heads up, I uninstalled and deleted my QW installation. And downloaded a fresh copy of 1.5rc6 and installed it. Cleared browser caches, tried multiple browsers and I’m still not getting the UI to click through. I have WP3.5 installed.

Thanks for all your help, I hope the information is helpful to you in solving the issue, thanks again.

Hey daggerhart,

The problem seems to occur because load-scripts.php (WordPress script minifier) loads its scripts before anything you used with wp_enqueue_script.

Even with
add_action( ‘admin_enqueue_scripts’, ‘qw_admin_js’, 0);

load-scripts.php is output before any other enqueued script. The problem is that this script assums jQuery is already loaded, leading to aformentioned error.

You may need to find another hook to bypass this.

I’m not wild on the idea of replacing all jQuery components, wouldn’t it be better to adapt the script to use the components present? If compatibility is a problem you can always specify the plugin only works with the most recent version of WP. Cheers.

Hi khromov,

This used not to be a problem because I was loading all my js in the footer, but then a WP update broke the footer js enqueuing, so I had to make do.

Since I can’t trust WP to not break their own CMS on update, I’m not personally wild about making my plugin use whatever random version of jquery/ui they decide to use that week. It’s much more important to me that my plugin work across many WP 3+ versions, because in the past I have seen many sites skip WP updates due to some new critical issue they’ve created in the ‘recommended’ release.

Also, I’m only affected enqueued/registered jquery/ui versions on my pluigin’s admin page, no other part of the site should ever be affected. I consider this a completely reasonable solution to my problem of having to refactor my plugin for every WP release.

I welcome other tested solutions if someone wants to try something differently.

All,

Currently, I have a completely fresh WP 3.5 install w/ QW 1.5rc6 and it works in FF and Chrome. But since others are still having issues, I’m going to try the following things.

1. I’m going to try putting it the js enqueue back in the footer
2. If that doesn’t work, I’m going to see if I can make small changes to my JS to allow it to work correctly in WP 3.5 and ~ 3.2.
3. If there is not a simple method that will work on both WP versions, I’m going to completely strip wordpress’s jquery/ui from loading on the query wrangler edit pages, and hardcode versions I know to work.

In future versions of this plugin, I plan to drop the admin tabs UI and focus much more on replicating views UI specifically. Having to support 1 js heavy interface should be plenty.

I’ve just committed 1.5rc7.

It is using WP jquery versions (no longer external), en-queuing QW js in the footer (works again), and made updates to js to adapt to new jquery-ui version (no longer have to close dialogs myself).

Please let me know if anyone continues to have issues.

Hey daggerhart!

The new version solved the JS issues.

I noticed one small bug, the “Rearrange X” links aren’t working. Error is: TypeError: jQuery(…).sortable is not a function

I’m really impressed with the functionality of QW. The only similar plugin I found is Views – it’s a premium plugin though and doesn’t have the great UI of Drupal Views. ( https://wp-types.com/ ).

Regarding WP updates, I strongly feel there should be a LTS/Maintenance channel (Like Drupal 6).

Thanks for the heads up khromov,

Rookie mistake, I forgot to re-enqueue jquery-ui-sortable. I’ve added it back in, and committed as 1.5rc8.

I strongly agree about LTS. Most of my needs for fixing bugs are directly related to WP updates. And thanks for the support, sorry to go off on a WP rant earlier.

If you need more powerful views-like features (exposed filters, arguments/contextual filters, relationships) I would recommend the 1.6beta version of QW to you, but I haven’t had time to make updates to it for WP 3.5. If I could stop supporting WP updates for QW 1.5, I could work a bit more on getting 1.6 released. Let me know if you’re interested and I will get it working w/ WP 3.5.

Marking as resolved. Thanks!

Hi dagger,

The additions in 1.6 sound great – would really make QW fully-featured! It would be great to use it in forthcoming projects.

Thanks for the help!

One of the reasons WP is the most popular CMS (powering over 50 % of the 1 million most visited websites according to https://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2011/11/29/wordpress-cms-crown-drupal-joomla/) is that they keep constantly improving things with shorter update cycles than the rest of the bunch. While LTS versions would ease things for some use cases, they would decrease the experience the rest of us, perhaps the majority, gets, for two reasons:

1. Plugins that concentrate supporting an LTS version might not be updated to support an up-to-date version of WP. If they’d support both the LTS and the up-to-date version, it’d be no different than how things are now, so the change the LTS would bring is to take away from the support for the up-to-date versions.
2. Having an LTS version means the WP core team spending more effort on supporting a certain old version of WP. That effort is removed from the amount of effort in making future updates – also from making future updates as effortless as possible.

The worst example of not exactly LTS but the downsides of long update cycles is Drupal. Because each version change is such a major overhaul, most plugin authors hadn’t jumped on the Drupal 7 wagon even a year after the final version was published. The most important plugin, Views, took one year from Drupal 7’s launch to have a stable version for it. With WordPress, the similar lag between new WP versions and the average of most of the still-updated plugins being updated to support it if needed is a week or two.

While Drupal community might expect to have a year of ‘plugin downtime’ every two-three years when a new version is released, WordPress users experience at most a month worth of ‘plugin downtime’ a year that they need to wait out before upgrading to the newest version of their favorite CMS. That makes Drupal’s model cause approximately four times worse ‘plugin downtimes’.

To make the update process smooth for plugin developers and users WP has a number of pre-release versions plugin authors can test things against. The compatibility-breaking changes between versions are always few, so they’re easier to weed out when they affect a specific plugin. In my experience each plugin will be affected by these changes on average once a year. Some more complex ones more often, and some plugins I use have not needed a single update since 2011 (eg. https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/send-from/).

Daggerhart: Hopefully you’ll find a way to stay alerted in advance on upcoming WP updates that affect your plugins and the suggested ways of adapting your code to them so you’ll have to spend less time worrying about them and more to continue your great development of the 1.6 line and other new features all of us are thankful for ??

Daedalon,

That’s definitely another opinion. But the article you link to just claims that “WordPress – good, Others – bad” because it’s easy to use. Nothing in that article about the concept of release cycles and how it impacts a product. But really, I don’t care, I just like to rant. You don’t have to convince me that WordPress is popular, and that drupal is less popular. This is just the same old Ford vs Chevy, MS vs linux vs Mac debate that the internet just can’t let go. I get it, you like what you like, I like what I like.

As far as an LTS version, the value in having that kind of stability along an upgrade path is that a company (I) can manage 20 to 30 times more drupal sites than wordpress sites, because every update doesn’t require re-testing every single module/plugin & custom functionality.

But just generally on that note, I would like to point out that I’ve contributed a plugin for WordPress who’s entire purpose is to try to rip off Drupal, and here you are using it. Take that for what you will.

Here is an event I remember from WP’s amazingly-awesome updates. Between version 3.1 & 3.2, this happened:
https://www.sitepoint.com/seven-things-you-should-know-about-wordpress-3-2/
and related:
https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/troubleshooting-wordpress-32-master-list?replies=9

If you think those are appropriate changes for a minor version increment, and that their release cycle allowed them a relatively appropriate amount of testing for that cycle, then that is where our differences of opinion lie. No need for further discussion.

Additionally, if you have a feed or something I could follow that makes deving for WP easier, I’d love the link.

I hope that my previous post is taken merely as pointers to what kind of software development model benefits a CMS and its user community the most. So far the WordPress model, which seems to me to have been heavily influenced by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_programming, has in the eyes of more than 50 % of the 1 million most visited websits proven to bring the best results of the bunch.

No software development model makes things perfect. In my view the model employed by WordPress is, on the balance, the best one I’ve seen for the task.

Unfortunately I don’t have a blog that would be of interest to WordPress developers in general. I occasionally pick up good articles from the default WP dashboard news widget. Some of the other plugin developers I know follow and take part in the discussion on https://make.www.ads-software.com/core/, and https://planet.www.ads-software.com/ might also be worth your while.

I don’t follow those actively myself as I’ve stayed clear of taking any plugin responsibilities myself – I like to chip in every now and then with the odd patch or two and more commonly with feedback and the occasional link or comment. While looking for the best answer to your question just now I found those two links above on the right side of https://www.ads-software.com/news/.

On that page the newest post https://www.ads-software.com/news/2013/01/2012-a-look-back/ also touches our topic: “2012 was the year that saw the creation of Make.www.ads-software.com, a network of sites for the teams of contributors responsible for the different areas of the WordPress project. Now anyone can follow along and get involved with the teams that work on …” That’s a new resource aiming to help developers stay up-to-date and communicate about development issues, aimed at making it easier than ever to develop great WordPress plugins for us all.

Hoping some of these links will ease your work.

Some picks:

https://make.www.ads-software.com/core/2012/12/17/the-release-cycle-has-wordpress-3-6-isnt-going/ about WP 3.6 possibly bringing JS changes (jQuery 1.9).

https://make.www.ads-software.com/core/2012/12/19/for-wednesday-lets-plan-on-a-3-5-1-ticket-triage-meeting/ about the hotfixes for JS and other issues in 3.5.

Very nice links Daedalon. On one of them I found mention of this little plugin: https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/wordpress-beta-tester/ Which seems exactly the type of thing that I would find useful.

Also, I didn’t know about make.www.ads-software.com. Seriously, thanks for the links, this is going to help me be more proactive about upgrades rather than reactive.

Daggerhart
Thanks for your hard work. QW is now working just fine in my WP installation. Again thank you and happy new year