cactus.cloud

Well, see, that’s exactly what I’m talking about.

Sending me an email that says, “F*** you idiot! Hope you die of cancer” is not a good example of user support.

But thank you for the kind wishes!

No, I don’t think you do understand. Why would I not believe you? Have I at any stage stated this? I think you are reading between lines I haven’t even written.

My point is that the plugin didn’t work for me. I used it. My site broke. I fixed it. I used it with a smaller data set. My site broke. I fixed it. I used a competing plugin. No faults. Whether the plugin has worked for you does not change any of this. Somewhere, there is an environment you have not accounted for, and it is breaking databases. Your server obviously does not provide this environment. That was my point. Nothing more.

Secondly, as I have said, the only reason I gave feedback was because I liked the plugin. Then, immediately after, it broke my db. I cannot un-give-feedback, so I had to lower it or risk misleading other users. If it broke my db, twice, then it could do the same for someone else. I am not going to endorse something that I don’t believe in.

If the plugin failed immediately, then I would have just left it, with no feedback. But I was trying to be nice, left a 5 star rating, and then it broke my site.

Finally, I am a PHP programmer and a plugin developer, and I would be crazy to endorse something that I think broke my database. Personally, I think 3 stars are generous, but until now I could not bring myself to give you any less.

So, why do I want to give you less? Here’s why:

1. I reported a potentially massive fault in your new plugin. Rather than looking for a solution, you got defensive, and denied there could be a problem. The user’s always wrong?

   How will faults be fixed if you don’t try to fix them. Telling me that it works on your machine does not make it work on mine. If you are not willing to even try and make an adaptable piece of software, do not distribute it as a publicly available plugin.

2. Your kneejerk reaction was to blame it on my server. My server is fine. But what if the plugin did cause issues with the server? Is that okay? “Yeah, the plugin’s cool, unless your server sucks, then it’ll break your entire site and you will lose everything.” Really? Do you think that is okay?
3. Your support attitude is terrible. I constantly deal with clients and users in a variety of conditions, ranging from simple WP support right up to ceo’s trying to develop enterprise level software. Sometimes a dumb question gets asked. But, they are only dumb questions when the client has not bothered to read the documentation. Do I treat them like they are dumb? No. Not even if its a free plugin. Do I imply they are lying? No. I work with them for a solution, as their life may exist outside of world thrilling world of coding. And I remember that if everyone had my knowledge and skills, I wouldn’t have a job. So I’m happy that they are willing to ask questions and put forward concerns.
4. Finally, you are releasing a plugin, that could break a WP database. This has been reported to you. You chose to ignore this report. Not everyone is prepared with recent database backups and a knowledge of how to use them. I really hope no one’s gonna lose their site because of this. I’d just like to think that your target audience may be too savvy for that, but you never know.

In summary, I just think your attitude sucks. But I have enjoyed the conversation :).

For what it’s worth, I managed to generate 500 posts in a local setting without any error. It took about four minutes still, but it worked.

So is that test you did run in a local environment.

I couldn’t generate 200 on my server – and it was slow. But I’ve already said that. I’m not here to debug your plugin, nor to repeat myself. I saw your plugin was new, I liked it, so I wanted to give you good feedback.

Then it broke my database… twice. Now, it could be something specific to my environment, or it could not. I just don’t know. The sample size is too small. If it was up to me, I would have taken the feedback back, but once it’s left it seems permanent. I’m not going to mislead people and say it worked and didn’t break my site. Because that would be misleading.

The fact is, your plugin failed and took a long time to get there and broke my site. Another plugin moments later succeeded quickly.

I don’t know what else you expect me to say about it. Telling me it works on your machine will not make it work on mine.

Also, just feedback man. I only left feedback because I thought it was a great plugin, five stars. Then I went back to the page that had been processing the posts (probably up to 2-300) and found an error. I could no longer access the database.

So, I played around with the db for a while, to find the table either corrupted or inundated with requests, even though the script should have stopped.

So, I eventually cleared the tables. New posts still were coming in (or at least being found). I ended up having to drop the whole table.

So I tried the plugin again, with a more conservative figure of 200 posts. After about 10 minutes (about half way through), the same error occurred.

Then I tried a different plugin with the same purpose. This plugin look seconds and created thousands of posts. There definitely appears to be a cause and effect relationship between running your plugin and database errors.

Anyway, I felt the need to update my positive review to warn people to back up.

I have just created 2000 in less than a minute with a different plugin – not a server error.

However, this plugin seems to take significantly longer (hours) and causes issues in the posts table.

Also, I was able to access the database with no issues outside of WP. The problem is that the plugin caused an error on the table.

After building a large set of posts with thumbnails and a category, I encounter the error.

I have tried this with 1000 posts, and with 200.

Anyway, it appears to enter some bad data into the database, resulting in an error along the lines of “connection to database failed”. This error essentially replaces the website, leaving both the front end and back end entirely inaccessible.

The only fix – without pinpointing the actual source of the error – has been to drop the posts and postmeta tables from the database and restore them from a backup. Truncating the posts table fails as it appears that the table is unable to find all of the new posts with new ones appearing. Does this plugin start some sort of asynchronous batch operation?

Anyway, this has happened twice, so I have tried a different plugin.

This different plugin did not have the option for thumbnail images, but it did generate 2000 posts in less than a minute without any errors.

Hey jimleeder,

The gallery will load in an approximate order due to the masonry script rearranging things to fit. What is your objective? How are they arranged (e.g. title, date, etc)? Do you have a link to the page? We may be able to achieve the same result with masonry disabled.

Cheers

Hey again jimleeder,

Yes, the plugin does support pagination – however, that is not included in the plugin (as pagination will change the rendering process/order of the page that won’t work with all user requirements).

I have a pagination PHP script for you that will work with the plugin. All you need is some basic PHP and CSS knowledge, and you’ll be sorted. Based on your last post, I think you should be okay.

Check out this link for a plain text version of the pagination script. If you have a lightweight code editor like notepad++, then you’ll find much easier to view. Essentially, add that to a page (with a php execution plugin) and edit the commented areas as specified in the document. I’ve had good luck with the plugin Insert PHP.

If you have any questions, get back to me, and I’ll do my best to help.

Hey there jimleeder,

It can be difficult to provide CSS for an unseen site, as the provided CSS may be overridden from other locations. More so, I really need to find the time to go through and check the CSS page for compatibility (which has been designed to have been maintained over updates) and add some new frequently requested CSS features.

In short, I’m sorry for the inconvenience caused there, and glad that you found a solution.

Cheers jimleeder

Hey jimleeder,

It sure is. Check out the custom CSS page on the plugin’s site for instructions.

If you have any issues, please get in touch.

Cheers, glad it was what you are after

Nice shots.

Okay, try this. If it works, I can add some parameters to make it standard in the next update.

So, try replacing the args variable declaration of masonry-post-gallery.php starting at line 280 with this:

//Set up query
$args = array(	'posts_per_page' => -1,
		'offset' => 0,
		'meta_key' => '_thumbnail_id',
		'orderby' => 'meta_value',
		'order' => self::$a['post_order'],
		'post_parent' => self::$a['post_parent_id'],
		'tag' => self::$a['post_tag_slug'],
		'post_type' => array_merge($post_type, explode(',', self::$a['custom_post_types']))
);

Tell me how you go.

Hey merlieon,

Sorry for my late reply. So, to my understanding, you are wanting the gallery with one image set to full screen width?

One problem I can see is the height setting. A percentage height will not work with the gallery. If you want a fixed height, you will need to specify a pixel value (e.g. 500px). If you do not specify a height, then the image will maintain its natural proportions.

The other consideration is, if you are enlarging an image, that image may look blurry. This cannot be helped, as the original image is lacking the information required to enlarge it. Reducing an image’s size is fine, but enlarging it can cause issues.

However, WordPress automatically creates smaller thumbnails of your images. You can specify which size of thumbnail to display by using the quality parameter (e.g. quality="medium", quality="large", or quality="full").

Finally, if you do specify a fixed height, you can use crop_images="true" to keep the image from appearing stretched. However, once again, a percentage height will cause errors.

I hope this has helped. If not, get back to me.

Actually quite a common question, so not at all stupid. If anything, it shows that I need to find some time to tidy up the website.

Cheers, for the update, glad to help!