Plugin reports zero-length content

Update: I found the custom field value (amazon_polly_audio_link_location) that contains the actual location of the generated audio file. If I put that url directly into my browser, the audio file starts playing and it looks like it was converted correctly.

I’m not sure why the inserted player on the page isn’t using the file for the play or download functionality though.

Okay. I’ve realized that this ticket is kind of a mix of two different issues. I’ll try to separate them here.

First:
The issue that the “How Much Will This Cost to Convert?” button on the admin page is reporting that my content is zero (0) characters long. I’m still not sure what is going on there, or why it’s reporting nothing.

Second:
The player/downloader on the front-facing page isn’t working. I figured out what was wrong here.

I set up the plugin to keep the audio files on my local server instead of using the Amazon CDN. The issue lies in that we’re using a CDN through another plugin to serve our media content to viewers of our site, and the plugin responsible for that functionality is replacing the url in the player from our site to the url of the cdn.

The easy answer to this issue is just to use the Amazon CDN.

The more complicated, but completely free way of doing it though (as long as our CDN stays free) is to upload the polly-created files to our CDN.

I’m guessing that there is something missing in your plugin that is causing this action to not take place. I say this for two reasons:

1) The action of uploading a file through other plugins doesn’t seem to have this issue

2) I can’t view the polly-generated files on our web server (despite the fact that they’re located within our uploads directory) when searching for them using the WordPress Media page.

At the very least, the polly-generated files should be showing up in the Media search tool. This for basic WordPress functionality. From there, the CDN plugin we’re using has inserted an “Update File to CDN” link to all files. This would allow us to push the polly-generated files to the CDN manually after they’re created. Not optimal, but it would be a work-around until the automatic CDN-upload that is associated with uploading a file through the typical WordPress Media adder, could be figured out and applied to your plugin’s actions.

Let me know if I should handle this in a different way (such as closing out this ticket and creating two new ones, or whatever), or if you need any more information.

Thanks.

Hi. I really need to have some movement on this issue. I’ve just found out that the Amazon CDN option that I currently have to use because of this issue is charging me on a per-page-load basis for serving these Amazon Polly files instead of on a per-instance-played basis. Thus, my costs for hosting the converted audio files on the Amazon CDN instead of having them available through the CDN that the rest of my site is using, is going to start costing me a bunch.

Can you please take a look at this?

Hi @writerdan,
Sorry for not responding before. We are currently working on some improvement on the plugin and trying to arrange some things, also based on your comments (very valuable! thx!).

Regarding the initial problem which you had – it will be fixed. In short, probably if I’m correct, you are getting 0 length if you are are creating post with ‘Text’ tab enabled instead of ‘Visual’.

Regarding the problem with another CDN. I do knot know how does this plugin works, and what does it exactly do, so it’s a bit hard for me to comment here. If you – or authors of this second plugin, will suggest some changes (I guess they know the best), we are happy to look into them.

Regarding WordPress Media page – yes, again +1 to you. Currently this is not supported. We had already this comment one time. So we noted it, and if we will see that this is important for users, we will modify this.

Regarding the last think. Can you elaborate? Or could you drop me email with information about it? stachlew – amazon – com

Cheers,
Tomasz

Hey Tomasz,

Thanks for the quick response.

1) Yes, I use the “Text” tab. The visual tab kills me. I’m a developer though. So I like to see the code and have control over everything. ??

2) I get the CDN issue. And there are so many CDN plugins out there, there’s no way that you should be responsible for integrating with all possibilities. The one easy way that I can see out of this bind (for my particular case) is to add the converted audio files into the WordPress Media Uploader tool. This is because my CDN plugin adds in custom functionality to re-up files to our CDN that are listed within the Media Uploader tool. They’ve just added a extra link to those that show up when you hover over a given item listed in the Uploader tool. I’ll contact the developer of the particular plugin we use and see if they’ve hooked in their CDN save functionality into some of the core WordPress functionality that would make your job in this regard easier. Will let you know what I hear from them.

3) My most recent comment deals more with my understanding of the workings of the Amazon bucket that gets created as part of the service this plugin provides. Right now I’m in the free tier, but I found out recently (by an automated email from Amazon) that I won’t be able to stay in the free tier for long if I keep pushing these audio converted files to their CDN. This is because the free Amazon CDN bucket has a limit on the number of GET requests that are made against the files I host there, and a GET request is made every time a page on my site loads if I have the Amazon-Polly-rendered player included on it. When I signed up for their CDN service, I was under the impression that the GET requests would occur when someone listened to the audio. That’s obviously not the case though. Now that I’ve thought about how everything seems to work, I get it. I just hadn’t thought this all through before. It’s not really something that you can change directly; however, fixing the issues that I’m currently having (described here and elsewhere) will allow me to move the hosting of converted audio files to our own CDN, and that way I won’t have to deal with the additional cost of the Amazon CDN. Does that make sense?

You guys have been great about responding to my issues. Thanks for working so hard on this. I really appreciate it.

Hi @writerdan,
1) It will be fixed on next release.
2) We will review it and how important this is for users. If this will be important, we will try to do something here. (in other words, I will try fix it, but I’m not able to provide you timeline for it)
3) It’s still a bit unclear for me, why there is GET request every time a page on site loads. Audio file is not being download before somebody will press PLAY, so perhaps it’s browser behaviour that it do some kind of GET request just to get some meta data about audio :/ Hmm… I will try to test it. Definitely strange thing!

Could you send me a message to my mailbox? (I provided it before).

Cheers,

@writerdan
So if audio files would appear in Media Library would this solve the problem?

Hey Tomasz,

Sent you a direct email.

Thanks.

Essentially, as a work around, yes. We’d just have to re-up the audio files from the WordPress Importer every time we updated the post. Annoying, true, but doable until a more direct method of integrating with CDN plugins can be found.

Still haven’t heard back from that other plugin developer, by the way. Will ping them again.

We are working on possibility of adding audio files to Media Library – but at least for now, only if they are store on local server (not S3)

Hi @writerdan,
In version 2.0 we have fixed:
– error with calculating post length
– possibility of adding local audio files to media library

Based on this I will close the topic. I know that you have reported a couple of things, if others are still open, I will be grateful for opening new ticket for each of them (especially the one regarding CDN if it’s still valid).

Cheers,
Tomasz

Sounds good, Tomasz. I’ll check this out, and if there’s still something that needs to be changed to have this work, I’ll put together a new ticket.

Thanks for all of the great updates!