Would be good, but . . .

  • The Mingle Forum plugin seems to offer a decent set of features and I would like to use it, but there is a conflict between Mingle Forums and Jetpack’s Share module that causes the forums to display multiple times on a single page. This is a deal breaker for me as I need my twitter sharing. If not for this, I’d give Mingle a 4 or 5 star rating.

    The author claims it’s the fault of Jetpack and there is nothing he can do about it, but Simple Press doesn’t have this issue. I am not sure what the reality of the situation is. Regardless, if you don’t need to use JetPack then Mingle seems to be a good forum plugin. If you do, then you should probably look elsewhere for your forums solution. (And don’t do Simple Press unless you are willing to fork out some cash for support.)

Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)
  • Plugin Author cartpauj

    (@cartpauj)

    Yeah it’s definitely jetpack’s problem. The problem is the way they are parsing the shortcodes. Simple Press doesn’t use shortcodes and that is why they do not see this problem. I’ve heard rumors that the latest version of Jetpack fixes a lot of problems with the sharing module, but I haven’t verified it.

    And how do you think they are parsing them wrong? I’ve got a user of my plugin saying mingle forums appear twice and I do shortcode parsing but as far as I’m aware I’m following the WP published documentation.

    Looking through your code why does the go() function in the wpf.class.php have an echo in it? Wont this mean that any plugin that uses something like apply_filters('the_content', $post_content); cause your echo to be executed which will dump the contents of $this->o to the output stream?

    Actually its because you don’t expect apply_filters to ever run more than once per page – my plugin does it so it can pull info from the final page markup and I suspect Jetpack does the same..

    The fix is:

    edit wpf.class.php and find line 675 which is this:

    return ob_get_clean();

    and add this before it :
    $this->o='';

    so it looks like :

    $this->o='';
return ob_get_clean();
    Plugin Author cartpauj

    (@cartpauj)

    Well Mingle Forum was an off-shoot of the poorly coded WP Forum plugin. We’ve done a lot of work but there are still lingering problems like this.

    Give this a shot and let me know how it works out for your user.

    1) Delete the ob_start(); completely
    2) Replace the return in the go function with:

    $final = $above_forum_ad."<div id='wpf-wrapper'>".$this->o."</div>".$below_forum_ad;
		return $final;

    If this works, we’ll make this a permanent change in the plugin code. Should go a bit further in preventing some duplication.

    You also need to make sure that you basically destroy $this->o because that ends up being appended to twice. So adding $this->0=”; would fix that, or you need to properly initialise it properly rather than doing it by doing a string append.

    Thread Starter Snowmane

    (@snowmane)

    I am glad my comment spurred this new effort into finding a solution. I really hope this issue can be resolved because Mingle seems to be one of the best free forum plugins for Word Press that I have encountered. I will continue to watch your comments with hope.

    Plugin Author cartpauj

    (@cartpauj)

    Steve you’re absolutely correct. I guess I’ll eat my own words on this one lol. Normally this would throw an undefined variable debug message but I’ve never seen one for this so I assumed it was being initialized properly. But considering how poorly the previous author coded everything else it definitely should’ve been something I investigated further. We’ll get this fixed in the next release. Best of luck to you!

    Plugin Author cartpauj

    (@cartpauj)

    It is being initialized as a member variable, just not reset before the filter runs. Hence the no debug message. Spot on Steve.

    I don’t actually use mingle – one of the users of my plugin does and he reported that my plugin caused mingle forums to appear twice on the page… I spent about 15 minutes digging round and found it.

    The problem is that often its another plugin that causes your own to misbehave and its the natural response to assume that its the other plug in that is wrong. But usually by working together the problem can be fixed and it means everyone ends up with better more resilient plugins.

    Plugin Author cartpauj

    (@cartpauj)

    Yeah, I have to admit I was definitely a novice (freshman year of college) when I jumped into the WordPress scene. Mingle Forum was my first attempt at making a name for myself and overall it has worked out quite well, but I do realize it is in need of a rewrite.

    I actually work full time as a Junior developer for Caseproof – makers of Pretty Link/Pro, Mingle, Affiliate Royale, and a new sweet plugin called MemberPress (hoping to launch in the next few weeks). The new job has definitely helped increase my knowledge in the WordPress arena ten fold.

    Really my plan is to write a new forum from scratch (maintaining Mingle Forum in its current state meanwhile) around the current database design. The new forum will follow a solid MVC software architecture which will make life much easier when it comes to troubleshooting bugs, adding new features, and making skin development easy for the design guys.

    Anyways, I really appreciate your 15 minutes of digging to point out something I should have seen from the start ??

Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)
  • The topic ‘Would be good, but . . .’ is closed to new replies.