Gwyneth Llewelyn

Hiya David ?? Thanks for the replies; yes, it’s quite odd, but (as you so well noticed), in spite of the error when installing, your plugin most certainly works.

As for the screenshots, I guess I’m lazy, I could resize them with CSS, but sure, a setting on the shortcode options (e.g. maxwidth or something like that) would certainly be welcome!

Thanks again for your plugin. It certainly makes me save precious time!

Awesome tutorial! It inspired me to create a plugin to add shortcodes for imagemaps; I was sort of stumped about how to create a parser for that. Your examples certainly were a fantastic resource! Thank you very much ??

I have the same problem with Yet Another Related Posts Plugin 3.2.2 (similar in concept). It sort of works, but I get a lot of 404’s — perhaps 20-50% of the time, depending probably on MySQL database load and associated timeouts when calculating the related posts to, well, a post.

I just noticed this by mere chance… I’m maintaining some 30+ sites with WP, and slowly moving them all to W3 Total Cache. Just two of them had this frequent “404” issue; I assumed this was just because my own Internet connection was slow (which would be strange, since the 404 I get is WP’s own, not a browser timeout…) or a particularly heavy-traffic day on a shared server. But then I tracked down the issue to the “related posts” plugin, which was present just on those sites where I got the most 404’s.

On a different site which had its own related posts plugin from a commercial template, the same thing happened! Curious that OutBrain’s plugin also has the same issue. Hmm. I wonder what Edge has against related posts ?? But it’s curious, isn’t it?

Oops… I meant W3 Total Cache of course (I’m not using WP Super Cache any longer hehe; W3 Total Cache is far, far better)

Hmm. I’m using WordPress 3.1.2 and Jetpack 1.1.2. I’m moving a site from one server to another; while both use different virtualization techniques and certainly there are some different settings on Apache + PHP + MySQL, they seem to be pretty much the same, except that this second server has a far slower database connection (not that the first one had a quick one, but certainly faster).

On the second server, I cannot activate Jetpack, whatever I try… I started with a “clean slate” with no plugins at all, and it failed. Then I started adding W3 Super Cache (it helps a lot with superslow database servers) and a few extra plugins, but Jetpack never managed a connection. This is a multisite WP install, so after activating multisite, I tried to activate Jetpack on the sub-sites (just two for now). No luck. And definitely the XML-RPC check works. Since, as said, the setup is pretty much the same, my only conclusion is that the superslow MySQL database access is somehow interfering, e.g. Jetpack requires a XML-RPC reply in less than a few nanoseconds ?? and since this server will take its time responding, Jetpack will silently fail. Is there some hack I can do on the Jetpack code to increase the timeouts or something? If this is really just timeout-related, maybe a good idea is to have the timeout as a user-configurable setting on Jetpack’s backoffice?

After a few tests, I’ve noticed that a few categories are out of its hierarchical structure, but it’s hard to understand what exactly is not correct. In one case, for instance, I have 4 whole subtrees that have a common parent, say, “Archives” (which in turn have a common parent, too). The entry for “Archives” is duplicated (with subtrees neatly split among them) even though the common parent is correct. Here I suspect some issues with WPML: apparently, although the language shown in DW is the “main” language for the site, those two “split” subtrees look like they come from different translations. It’s hard to say for sure because DW correctly shows only the translation in the current language. So there might not be any duplication at all.

Whew. This is definitely worth testing a lot! In any case, I seriously suspect now that I already had these “duplicated” entries on the very long category list, I just wasn’t aware of them because I couldn’t see the hierarchy easily…

This is fantastic, Qurl! ?? Thank you very much! To be perfect, it would be great if you could add the same hierarchical structure to the “Single Posts” option (where all categories are also displayed, too).

Great work!

Perfect! This worked flawlessly for me, too! Thank you so much ??

Hrrmpf. The markup on the post completely broke the layout. Anyway, here goes what I meant with hierarchical categories:

Background colours
 	red
	green
	blue
Foreground colours
	red
	green
	blue

which become, under Dynamic Widgets category selection option:

• Background colours
• blue
• blue
• Foreground colours
• green
• green
• red
• red

I agree. This is one of the best plugins I’ve ever come across for developing very, very complex sites where the layout changes frequently depending on the category/page the user currently is. In a recent case I’m developing, I don’t even know how I could have done it without Dynamic Widgets. I’m using the Carrington Template Framework, which can deal with different layouts for different categories/pages/posts etc., but the sheer amount of files that would be needed to accomplish the same is simply staggering!

I’d certainly vote for this plugin to be part of the core functionality of WordPress ?? Then again, if it works so well as a plugin, why bother? ??

Luckily for me, the client agreed to postpone the multiple translations, so I just focused on one, assuming that I could get back to it later, in time. There are lots and lots of dynamic menus (menus embedded into dynamic widgets) to create for the 160+ categories, so I pretty much ignored the WPML issue and went ahead…

Today, while adding a new plugin, I suddenly realised that all menus stopped working. To be more precise, all category links returned an error page. Well… not all. A few are pointing to the wrong category instead, or, although the link is explicitly for the main page, it points to a different language instead, all of a sudden (and the translated page has more wrong category links, sometimes pointing to another different language!). This is happening automatically: I checked and double-checked all link entries on the menus. They are all correct. Apache is getting the correct category link, too. But something is hooked on the “category” filter and making DW play havoc…

Well, the usual solution in this case is to delete plugins until things start working again. I immediately suspected that my theme template (built upon the Carrington framework) was the culprit, so I’ve changed it. The error persisted. Then I turned WPML off. Still no luck! Then I started to eliminate plugins, one by one. Fortunately, I was lucky, it seems that after deleting two redundant XML Sitemap Generators, Dynamic Widgets started working again. Whew! I have hundreds of hours getting this to work, and I didn’t realise I would be so dependent on Dynamic Widgets for this site!…

My conclusion: DW is very, very dependent on the order plugins are installed and removed! This might account for my problems with getting the menus working properly in different languages. As said, I’ll focus now just on the main language, and postpone a fix for later. Apparently, errors mostly happen with other plugins interfering with DW — mostly, pre-3.X plugins. So I just have to be careful!

I’ll add a few suggestions on other threads. I think this one can be closed for now. Thanks for the incredible support ?? A small donation is on the way.

No, I’m not using Custom Post Types.

The “weirdness” about having the widgets sometimes appearing, and sometimes not, is possibly related to WP Super Cache: I had it installed, but inactive. Apparently, even an inactive WP Super Cache does some caching! Oh well. Now I’ve un-installed it, to make sure it doesn’t interfere with the testing.

The theme is a pretty standard (for now) since I’m just working on the structure while waiting for the designer… I’d be glad to send you a link to it in private (since it’s not open to the public yet).

Finally, I believe that the problem really has to be with WPML. I’ve done a test on a different category and with a different widget on a different area of the site, and it seems to be working as expected. I’ll do a few more tests with other categories. Possibly I have been extremely unlucky with one category that happened to be broken ?? Or perhaps it’s subcategories that are giving problems… I don’t know, but I’ll continue to test it. I suddenly realised that doing the whole site without DW will take eons ?? so I better put a lot of effort in figuring out this issue…

Qurl, thanks so much for getting back to this issue, and so quickly too ?? I see that Dynamic Widgets has a great community and makes me far more happy to be using it, knowing that so many helpful people are willing to spend their time answering questions — a very heartfelt thanks!

Ok, it’s good to know that it only uses the ID (which makes a lot of sense, really). So, one problem less to worry about! I will have to try out to see if by some reason WPML “lost” the connection between the languages for that specific category, and that would explain everything.

The menus are linked together as you say, yes. But since I also suspected the menus, I did use a plain text widget. When DW is set to “static” it obviously shows up in every language; once it’s set to dynamically appear only for certain categories, it shows up perfectly on the “main” language, but not on the translations.

Still, this seems to be a bit more complex. Sometimes, when switching from one language to another, the widget will remain! But a page refresh (in that language) will make it disappear. Since I have no cache on — except what WP inherently caches, or, who knows, WPML might do some caching at well — this behaviour is strange. So something weird is happening.

What I’m also going to try out is a fresh set of correlated categories, a new set of widgets and menus and so forth, and getting the WP site to emit the current category it thinks it is in. What I suspect now is that DW is not to blame, but that WPML, for some reason, has “broken” language connections in some categories, even though the WP backoffice shows those correctly. This particular site has lots of categories! (160 was my last count) During the setup, this often meant categories that have changed location in the hierarchy, were deleted and recreated again, renamed, and so forth. Perhaps WPML has not updated parts of its database tables correctly for some reason, and this would explain why DW is having difficulties.

Thanks for the outstanding help so far!

Sort of. Let me try to give an example with numbers to see if it makes more sense that way.

Let’s assume that my site has the following categories in the main language:

1 – No category
2 – News
3 – Photos
4 – Archive

There is a set of translations in two additional languages. So, category 5 is, say, “no category” in French, and so forth; category 9 is “no category” in Japanese.

These are all linked in WPML, e.g.

1 (main) -> 5 (translated in French), 9 (translated in Japanese)
2 (main) -> 6 (translated in French), 10 (translated in Japanese)
3 (main) -> 7 (translated in French), 11 (translated in Japanese)
4 (main) -> 8 (translated in French), 12 (translated in Japanese)

Now, what I want to do is to display a widget (and its translated content) ONLY when the user is currently on category 2 (or, if they are viewing it in French, cat 6; if they’re Japanese, they’ll be on cat 10).

With Dynamic Widgets, I can only select the first 4 categories, i.e. what I’ve listed above. This is correct for Dynamic Widgets: it understands correctly how the translated categories are linked together, and so just needs to display the “main” ones.

The widget actually contains a contextual menu, i.e. it pulls up a menu specific for that category (configured under the normal WP3.+ menu setup, and with associated menus in the two other languages). So, when the user is on category 2, the widget gets correctly displayed, and it shows the appropriate menu for the main language. All other categories (or pages, and single posts outside that category) never display the widget, as expected: Dynamic Widgets does that well and without flaws.

When, however, the user is on category 6 (i.e. viewing the site in French), neither the widget, nor the menu inside it, are shown. So I suspect that somehow Dynamic Widgets has “lost” the relationship between 2 <-> 6 <-> 10 for some reason. A possible workaround would be to specifically make the widget appear on categories 2, 6, and 10, by selecting them manually (it would be a pain to keep them in sync with the translations, but, well, doable). But that is not possible, since Dynamic Widget’s configuration for the widget never shows the categories 5-12 for selection, but just 1-4.

To make sure that the problem is not with the menus, I just created a simple text widget. The same problem arises.

The only thing that I might be missing here is that somehow Dynamic Widgets expects a textual relationship between the categories, e.g. if the main category is “News” and its URL bit is “news”, then the translated version in French has to be news-fr and the one in Japanese news-jp. If that’s the case, it would explain why categories 6 and 10 are not “seen” by Dynamic Widgets to be linked to category 2…

MMh strange. In my case, the path in wp-content/advanced-cache.php is correct. I still get the “Cannot load wpsuperchache” error! No errors in the log, either. I can access the WP Super Cache panel without problems, it’s just when deleting the cache that this happens.

On one of my MS sites with little traffic I’ve turned debugging-to-email on to see if I can catch a few more errors that way. It’s definitely strange…