Tag: plugins

The “house of cards” approach to development is a “fatal error” in itself

This morning my work of putting out a fire for one client was interrupted by the need to put out a blazing inferno for another client. Specifically, they’re running a big sale on their WooCommerce store, and the site was returning a fatal error.

Turning on debugging, I saw this message:

PHP Fatal error: Declaration of Dhii\\Container\\ProxyContainer::has($key) must be compatible with Psr\\Container\\ContainerInterface::has(string $id): bool

Ugh.

There is so much about this that I hate. Mainly, what is any of it for? I have to question whether any of the developers of PayPal Zettle POS for WooCommerce, the affected plugin, really know either. This plugin suffers from what I call the “house of cards” approach to development. Why write your own code if you can just slap together dozens of packages that already do the things you want? On the surface, that’s great. But the problem is, then you don’t really know what your own software does.

I recognize that this is a necessity in many cases. It’s just not practical to reinvent every wheel. But when your application is structured like this, you may have 6 different kinds of wheels, or wheels made out of other wheels, or wheels that also contain a kitchen sink. As usual, xkcd nails it:

Fortunately, WP_DEBUG let me see exactly where the errors were occurring, and although my 20 years of idiosyncratic PHP development experience didn’t help me to understand what the error meant, this StackExchange post did. I just had to change this:

public function has($key)

…to this:

public function has($key): bool

And then I had to do that about a dozen more times in various other files deeply nested in the plugin’s vendor folder, until the PHP fatal errors stopped appearing.

In the WordPress support forums, I discovered near the top of the list a post from someone else experiencing this same error, and the devs suggested it was probably a plugin conflict. They didn’t seem interested in pursuing the possibility that their own code was broken.

But, then again, it really isn’t their code. And that’s the problem.

I’m not above reproach here. I’m a WordPress developer. I use other people’s code all the time! I even sell a product that is substantially constructed out of other people’s code. But I am very judicious about what does or does not get placed in my vendor folder. And I realize that if something goes wrong with it, it’s up to me to fix it, even if it’s not my code.

Speaking of which… I have some updates to make. Gotta go!

Some perspective on Gutenberg

Today I had to do some work on a client’s site that I didn’t build but have ended up maintaining, which is built from an amalgam of multiple “page builder” plugins, but most prominently, WP Bakery.

I was just explaining to my wife (who is not a developer but who uses WordPress, both Classic Editor and Gutenberg/Block Editor, extensively) what it’s like to use WP Bakery:

“Imagine the most annoying aspects of Gutenberg that you find the most annoying*, then imagine something ten times clunkier, a hundred times uglier, and a thousand times less intuitive. That’s WP Bakery.”
—Me

*Yes I really did, deliberately, say it that redundantly.

On the Futility of Naming Colors

I posted this over on the ICS Calendar blog, but it’s probably of some interest to the audience of this blog, dealing with the intersection of code and design.

HTML has “named colors” which are… weird. And I have finally given up on using them in the plugin, which was a bit of a silly thing to do anyway, when there are 16 million RGB colors at one’s disposal. The post ends with swatches of both the old and the newly revised color palettes.

https://icscalendar.com/on-the-futility-of-naming-colors/

Please think twice before leaving a flippant negative review

Last week I launched a new WordPress plugin, No Nonsense, and much to my surprise, it started to pick up steam after just a couple of days. It turns out, it got featured with a nice review on WP Tavern, and people took notice.

Unfortunately, almost immediately, it got a couple of really negative reviews, both of which were clearly dashed off with very little thought, or apparently even the slightest bit of effort on the part of the reviewers to try to determine the cause of their issues before leaving a negative review — rather than submitting a support ticket, which would be the correct channel for addressing a problem… if they actually wanted to solve it.

I take pride in the quality of my work, and I try hard to make sure it performs flawlessly. I respond quickly to any issues — even for a free plugin like this — because I want to make things right. So it is really painful to have the product of my efforts permanently stained with a negative review by someone who can’t be bothered to take the time to write a single cohesive sentence detailing the issues they had with it.

I understand the temptation to rip on something you think is garbage, and I’ve left a few one-star plugin reviews myself. But I feel it’s important to at least explain in detailed and objective terms why I think something is bad. And maybe if it’s clearly something brand new, I’d wait a while to see if the creators take the time to work out the kinks first.

So, no matter what you do, no matter where you are, if you are in a position to criticize someone else’s work, I implore you to take a second and think about the impact you might be having on that person and on what they’re trying to accomplish, and whether or not your criticism is truly valid and warranted. Perhaps it is not, in which case, I would respectfully suggest you stay quiet. But maybe it is. In that case, think about whether a terse and flippant negative review is really the best way you can contribute to improving the situation, or if there’s a more effective, more constructive way to share your input.

New WordPress plugin: Remove Broken Images

If you have a WordPress blog dating back many, many years, and you’ve just completed a massive cleanup of images from your Media Library, or if you just have any other reason why there might be a bunch of <img> tags in your blog posts that no longer go anywhere, you may be wondering if there’s an easy way to just, you know, have those annoying broken image icons not show up all over your pages.

Now there’s a way!

OK, actually there already were a few different ways, via free plugins, but as is so often the case with a lot of these types of small, single-purpose plugins, I find they’re almost always either really clumsily written, overloaded with unnecessary features, or both.

So I wrote my own.

This plugin couldn’t be simpler. It assumes that you just don’t want to display broken images — whether that’s the ugly little “missing image” icon some browsers display, the large outlined box containing an ugly little icon and the missing image’s “alt” text, or just a big blank white space. It doesn’t have an option for showing a different, placeholder image. Because, let’s be honest, that doesn’t look good… especially if you have more than a few of these to deal with. Having the same placeholder appear all over your site looks as bad as having broken image icons everywhere.

The plugin relies on the JavaScript error event, and uses some very compact jQuery code to remove any <img> tags that trigger the error, and their containing link and caption element, if present.

The end result is a clean looking blog with no indications whatsoever that anything is missing. Unless the text of your blog post describes the image in excruciating detail. In that case… you’ll just have to wait for version 2.

You can download Remove Broken Images right now from the WordPress Plugin Directory.