Carl Gross

@takayukister

>> What other plugins and theme do you use on the site?

I can tell you that I’ve tested the issue with all my plugins deactivated, and the issue is not present. As soon as I activate CF7, the issue arises. To answer your question, the plugins installed on my site are:

Akismet Anti-Spam
BackWPup
Breadcrumb NavXT
Classic Editor
Contact Form 7
Elementor
Flamingo
HTML Editor Syntax Highlighter
Jetpack by WordPress.com
Master Slider
Media Library Assistant
Outdated Plugin Notifier
SVG Support
TablePress
Ultimate Post List
Widget Options
Hummingbird
Magic Liquidizer Responsive Table
Wordfence Security
WP Rollback
Yoast Duplicate Post
Yoast SEO

Theme is Spacious (free version). I have not tested the issue with the WordPress default theme.

Sorry, I should have mentioned that is not my actual password. I’ll note that in my post.

@pidengmor FYI I asked the devs of that plugin, and they gave me an SQL query which returns all posts with FB/IG oEmbed content. If you’re interested, you can see the post here. One interesting note is that my site seems to have one post with FB oEmbed content. But that particular post doesn’t have any of the rich content described in this article–the post contains only a plain link to a FB page. So because of that, it looks like I have no content that needs fixing.

Great thanks very much for all that.

OK thanks for confirming.

So what about my actual query results, and the fact that they contain only one post (which itself doesn’t have any rich oEmbed content). Would you agree that your plugin would not have any affect on my site’s current content?

OK thanks for tha tinfo.

I ran the SQL query. Will EVERY query result be a post containing a Facebook oEmbed? Or will the query results contain many entries, including all of my Facebook oEmbeds? I think the latter–correct? I say that because there are 24 query results, and only one appears to be from a post of mine (screenshot). The others seem to pertain to my theme, and maybe a plugin.

Furthermore, the one post in the search results (postid 2292; see post here) doesn’t seem to have any of the ‘rich’ embedded content that is described in this article, e.g. nice image, nice icon, nice text formatting, etc. All that exists on the page is a link to a Facebook page (screenshot).

In light of this, it doesn’t look like my site as any content that needs fixing. What do you think–would you agree with that?

OK thanks for the quick reply. I’ll try the DB search now.

In the meantime, I have one more question about your plugin. Let’s say I have existing oEmbed content, and install your plugin. Will my existing content be automatically fixed, or will I have to manually remove existing oEmbed content and re-add it using your plugin?

>> You can either do nothing, and lose the oEmbed feature but retain all your content as it is now.

Right. But if I do nothing, how much content will I lose? Is it zero, or is it a lot? That’s what I’m trying to figure out right now. If I can’t figure that out, then I may just install this plugin (or another) and call it a day.

Also, that article specifically says the plugin fixes the issue for content embedded using the block editor (Gutenberg). I’m not sure if it covers classic editor :-/ I’ll ask in their forums.

Yeah. I figured I might have to search the database. But if so, what exactly to search for?

Thanks for the reply, but unless I missed it, that page doesn’t exactly answer my question. The page describes a plugin that will fix the issue. But ideally I’d like to first check if the issue applies to me at all. I’d rather not install a plugin, and spend time configuring it, if the issue doesn’t apply to me. But in the event that I can’t do that, or it is too time consuming, I guess I could install/setup this plugin as a fall back option.

>> Do not be discouraged that your Plugin has a limited shelf life as that applies to the majority. For the next few years, maybe more, your Plugin will play an important part in reminding people to keep “their” Plugins updated. This will help every WordPress site be more secure and probably operate better as well.

Gotcha, thanks for that.

>> And I do believe you have “the only Plugin of this type” so Kudos to you for putting it together and providing it for all. ??

I did indeed come up with the idea for this plugin on my own. But to be completely up front, I then researched to see if anyone else had done something similar, and found another plugin. But it didn’t appear to be recently modified. I believe my code architecture is quite different from theirs (if I recall, they take an object oriented approach). Also, one of the main reasons I built this plugin was just to get experience building a WordPress plugin from scratch and getting it in the plugin repo. But I’m very glad to hear others are finding it useful.

>> I’m not sure where the Description text comes from

It’s in the file header DocBlock for the plugin’s main PHP file, in the ‘Description’ tag.

>> As to your questions, I would think that both, bg color and a border, would create a stronger Call To Action impulse and that is the idea.

OK let me play around with those and see how they look–thanks very much.

>> Displays “Last Updated” info as provided from one site: www.ads-software.com. Yellow background is 1 yr. Orange background is 2 yrs. Update or Replace as needed.

OK yes, that does indeed kill several birds with one stone. I’ll keep that in-mind and add it when I add the date color highlighting.

>> Off topic, it strikes me as odd that on the Plugin page the Description provided by a lot people include the word “Plugin” which is redundant and a waste of characters IMHO.

There’s a finite amount of information to be stored in the universe, and these are taking up unnecessary space ?? All jokes aside, you’re probably right–there’s no need to use the word ‘plugin’ in most of these cases, including mine.

Thanks very much!

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by Carl Gross.

Thanks for the discussion–I really appreciate it.

>> I’m thinking most people will start to use the new “Auto-updates” feature so it won’t be seen that often.

Actually it didn’t dawn on me, but with that new feature, my plugin will have less utility (although not zero utility).

>> Forgot to mention the above colours would be used only for the TD of your Plugin.

Yep, makes sense. That’s what I had in-mind. No need to hijack the entire row.

>> Once you get into 3 colours it can get a bit confusing.

Sure, simpler is probably better here.

>> 1 yr.
background-color: #fff8e5;
>> 2 yr.
background-color: #f56e28;

So something like this? That works. But just to play devil’s advocate, I thought about a border only. But I’d have to use darker colors (screenshot). Thoughts on that?

>> Remember that without being to remove these colours, they need to easily seen and only the 2 yr. will be obtrusive. And obtrusive is what a 2 yr. notice should be, urging that something be done with that Plugin.

OK that’s sound, and I can get behind it–the 2 year notice should be a bit obtrusive.

What about displaying a color key on the page to let users know what the colors mean? Or maybe an onhover and/or onclick tooltip somewhere (in the column header maybe)?

Separately, one big limitation of my plugin is that it can monitor only plugins in the WordPress plugin repo. It cannot monitor plugins downloaded from third party sources, e.g. CodeCanyon, or plugins that are only on GitHub, etc. I’ve done some research and it seems like this is just something I’ll have to live with. Would you agree?

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by Carl Gross.

Hey thanks very much for this.

>> Suggestion: give a bit more “oompf” to plugins =>3 years old as they should definitely be updated, replaced or removed.

OK right, thanks for that. Something like that is actually already on the ‘to-do’ list (see here). I was thinking of more like 1 year, rather than 3 years. One year is about the average time between minor updates–right? Thoughts? Why did you choose 3 years?

And I was thinking of perhaps three colors, like green, orange, and red, to indicate degrees of out-of-date-ness

Thanks for the reply. Here are my follow-ups.

>> Have you tried using it in our official HTML widget?

No I have not. I just tried, and it appears that the Elementor ‘HTML’ widget does not suffer from this issue. I should be able to use that to resolve my issue. But why does the WordPress ‘Custom HTML’ widget suffer from this issue? Are you able to replicate that issue on your end?

Hello. Any update on this? I’m not sure why it was marked as resolved.

Thanks.