Slider went blank

Same problem on a site I contribute to. Blank spot where the slider used to be. No recent changes to the website.

Website: https://dbbrewingcompany.com/
WordPress Version: 4.4.2
Instagram Slider Version: 1.3.0
Theme Name: Genesis child theme

Possible that Instagram has updated their API and this approach for a feed is no longer valid?

Yes, this happened once before and it was an Instagram API change.

I just installed the slider on a test site and same thing happened. I also tried a competing plugin and also got a blank space.

@forkmedia, in my searching I’m unable to find any notice online from Instagram about a cutoff happening on February 9th. Do you have anything definitive or is it also just a hunch for you?

Just a hunch based on my previous experience. The fact that you also experienced the same thing and another Instagram plugin I tried doesn’t seem to work indicates its a good possibility its related to IG itself.

But if you haven’t found anything regarding an API change, we’ll just have to wait until the developer responds.

I am having the exact same issue on my own website. It is incredibly frustrating because I have a spot for the Instagram slider both in the footer and slider of my website. Instagram recently added the option to be logged into multiple accounts, which I am. I am wondering if this could be possibly be creating some form of the issue?

If any techie would like to help me out that would be greatly appreciated. Here is the link to my website for reference.

Any and all help would be greatly appreciated! I am very frustrated and in need of assistance.

https://jrwebstudio.com/contact/

Also try contacting the author of the widget. I’m hoping that he will have more knowledge and or know how to fix our issue.

@alessiafio, I imagine that the author is notified of new form topics and posts so that may not be necessary.

If anyone does reach out directly to the author of the plugin, please be very courteous. It’s a completely free plugin so there is no obligation to provide support. Not to mention that the change that broke the plugin may be entirely out of the author’s control.

II tried contacting him yesterday via his website but the contact form refused to submit.

I googled around and found another contact form with his name, verified it was the developer, and let him know about this thread on the support forum.

When this happened some time ago, I contacted him and he did respond and was able to fix it.

Crossing my fingers he’s still working on WP plugins. None of the competing plug-ins I looked at had all the features I want – caching IG posts in the WP library; adding all the tags and comments; controlling speed and number of posts, etc.

@oxdeer, I understand that and I respect that it is a free widget. I would just like the issue to be fixed, and I understand that it may not be the creator fault or something that he can fix himself.

Monitoring this issue as well. Would just GUESS that it has to do with the IG update. I was experiencing the problem before any account switching.

I have a temporary working solution until the author is able to investigate further.

it looks as if instagram has added a cache param to the end of their image URLs which is causing the save_wp_attachment() function to return false when checking if the provided URL matches the expected image types. This also explains why there was no chatter from Instagram about API changes or the like. A new URL caching param isn’t really a noteworthy feature for most users.

Add these lines to the beginning of the function save_wp_attachment() which it looks like starts on line 1038 in the file instagram_slider.php in the plugin’s directory.

// temp fix, strip cache param off of url
$parsed_image_data = parse_url($image_data['url']);
$image_data['url'] = $parsed_image_data['scheme'] . '://' . $parsed_image_data['host'] . $parsed_image_data['path'];
// end temp fix;

As you can see, it’s back in working on the site I provided as a broken example in my original post: https://dbbrewingcompany.com/

Mine was set to query for a user, not a hashtag, so not sure how universal this fix will prove to be.

disclaimer: if you are not confident editing files directly then you’ll need to wait for the author. I cannot assist you if you manage to bork your site attempting this edit.

I would definitely bork my site if I tried. Will wait..

Made a git repo with the patch applied. You can install as a new plugin (after disabling, not uninstalling) the original. Instructions provided in the readme.

https://github.com/andrew-boyd/wp-instagram-slider-widget

Pull requests are welcome if anyone sees a flaw in the applied patch.

Works for me.

BIG THANKS! to Andrew @oxdeer

Works better than ever. Thanks to @oxdeer!