First a special thanks to both Amy Bevan and JCDonley of Dawnsinger LLC for making a donation to support my work on the plugin during 2009… believe me it’s very much appreciated!

Unfortunately I don’t paid for working on the plugin so I can’t afford to spend a great deal of time working on it; sadly goodwill doesn’t pay the bills. So I apologise if an update has been a long time coming. However if hopefully more people can contibute even just a little then I’ll be able to dedicate some more time to it.

That out of the way, as some of you may already know version 1.1.0 of the Page Blocks plugin has been released, and it brings with it a couple of changes:

• The plugin now works with WP 2.8 & 2.9
• The configuration of page blocks is now on a separate admin page
• Themes using multiple loops are now handled (only needed for WP prior to 2.8)

The configuration of page blocks is now done on a separate admin page called Page Blocks under the Settings menu, removing the complexity and making it easier to configure multiple pages at the same time.

The configuration is still done by checking the appropriate checkboxes to enable them and entering CSS into the textbox to the right of each checkbox, so nothing new there.

Also what became apparent was that some themes used many different WordPress loops, and this caused a whole lot of headaches. So now for users of WordPress prior to v2.8 there is a template function called page_blocks_loop() that can be added into your theme immediately before the loop you want to apply the page blocks to; all other loops will be ignored.

Thankfully with WordPress 2.8 the plugin can automatically determine which is the main loop and this template function is not required.

I haven’t been able to update the information on this site just yet, but hopefully the information on the WordPress.org site will be enough to get people started.

FYI I have had a couple of reports of users not being able to use the plugin at all as it causes a fatal PHP error. I’m not 100% sure if this is a PHP 4 problem but it sounds like one.

I am working on resolving this issue, and if someone out there is using the plugin without problems with PHP 4 then I’d appreciate it if you could let me know as I don’t currently have PHP 4 set up. Nevertheless I will post a patch for those users having this trouble as soon as I can.

I hope you all have a great year for 2010, and keep on plugin!

Regards,
Paolo

Thanks to all those who either left comments or sent me email about the issues with WordPress v2.8 and v2.8.1. I may not have had the time to reply to everyone yet, but I do read them all.

You’ll all be happy to hear that the Page Blocks plugin v1.0.3 is now compatible with versions of WordPress up to and including v2.8.1 and is now downloadable from the WordPress Plugin Directory at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/page-blocks. I’ve tested it on a stock standard installation of WordPress with no other plugins and using the default Kubrick based theme, so if you install it on your site and it still doesn’t work properly then please contact me using the contact form at http://wordpress.softwud.com/contact-us.

For those interested it seems that the guys at WordPress.org have made numerous changes going from v2.7.1 to v2.8… which is good for users. However the behaviour of some WordPress functions has been changed causing the plugin to behave incorrectly; these changes seem to be related to the new plugins security changes the new Widget API.

Thanks again for all the positive feedback… and stay tuned for some new features to be released soon!

Best Regards,
Paolo

I’ve just released v1.0.2 for those users who wish to use the plugin but are trapped into PHP v4.3 or greater. Sadly there are still hosting companies out there using PHP 4 but now that support is officially over let’s hope they invest in the upgrade.

Also for those users on the cutting edge with WP v2.7.1 I’ve also verified that the plugin still works and updated accordingly so no need to fret there. Of course WP v2.8 is on its way but that’s another story.

Thanks for all the positive feedback… and whether you hate it or not keep it coming, I’m happy to hear from you!

Best Regards,
Paolo

Firstly, thanks to all those brave souls that have been downloading the Page Blocks plugin… it seems that the number has surpassed the 160 mark, so many thanks for your vote of confidence! More importantly though I would like to thank Jennae Petersen, Extrakun, and Jennifer Hampton who all pointed out a minor oversight on my part that prevents the plugin from working.

One thing I didn’t take into account when uploading the plugin was that WordPress.org names the plugin’s directory page-blocks instead of page_blocks when packaging the plugin’s files into a ZIP file, which once the plugin is installed prevents the required CSS stylesheet and javascript from being found and hence working.

The plugin code has now been patched to correct this issue, so if you have already installed version 1.0 and wondered why the plugin wouldn’t work, all you need to do to fix this is upgrade to version 1.0.1 by either:

• Automatically upgrading from the admin backend. Note that depending on how long ago you installed the plugin it could take up to 12 hours for the notification message to appear.

• Download the latest version from the WordPress Plugin Directory and install it yourself manually. If you do this you only need to extract the files from the ZIP file and overwrite the page-blocks directory contents without de-activating the plugin first.

However you use or whatever you think about the plugin, I certainly look forward to reading all about it, so please feel free to contact me using the Contact Us form on the plugin’s website.

Regards,
Paolo Ermani
SoftWUD

Please note that this site has been thrown together in a bit of a hurry however it is fully functional. We are still working on fine tuning the appearance and we should have it all finalised soon. We look forward to seeing you here!

Best Regards,
SoftWUD

I decided to try this out on one of my hosting servers, and I’m glad I did. To my puzzlement the scheduling code just wouldn’t work… what the heck was going wrong?!?!

Finding the cause

After instrumenting the WordPress source code I finally narrowed down the cause… the paranoid security configuration of my hosting company.

This is a problem?!?! Well the trouble is that the “cron” code depends on PHP’s fsockopen() network function. The WordPress code uses this function to run the code in the wp-cron.php file, and it is this code which looks at the events that have been scheduled and tries to carry them out.

Since fsockopen() is blocked from working, even from making connections looping back to the same server, so to is the whole “pseudo cron” event scheduling feature of WordPress. So if you need to have code that runs at regular intervals e.g. database backup, creating RSS feeds, sending out newsletters etc. you may face a rude shock.

A solution ?

In the ideal world I’d expect that WordPress would provide a fallback mechanism for servers that have this problem, however in the real world I’m not so optimistic. I haven’t checked how prevalent this problem may be so for now I’m documenting this issue in case others are scowering the internet for answers.

For coders who must absolutely rely on this “psuedo cron” there may be a workaround. I’ve found that in the WordPress code there is a short-circuit that will call a callback function instead of attempting to execute the wp-cron.php code. To do this you need to do the following (see the code sample below):

• Create a callback function to schedule that returns false
• Register a custom “schedule interval” by overriding the ‘cron_schedules’ filter
• Schedule a single event

function my_callback()
{
  // Do something here...
  //
  // VERY IMPORTANT:
  //
  // If this is a single event you will need to "unschedule" the event
  // at this point. To do this you will need to store all of the values
  // that you need to pass to wp_unschedule_event(...) such as
  // the time the event is scheduled for, the hook name (in this
  // example 'my_schedule_hook_name'), and any optional
  // parameters.
  //
  // Also make sure that this function returns false otherwise the
  // short-circuit won't work.
  //
  return false;
}

function my_schedules($wp_schedules)
{
  $new_schedules = $wp_schedules;
  $new_schedules['my_schedule_hook_name'] =
    array('interval' => 86400,  'display' => __('My Interval Name'),  'callback' => 'my_callback');
  return $new_schedules;
}
//
add_filter('cron_schedules', 'my_schedules');

// Trigger the scheduling on a daily basis - Note for plugins do this
// somewhere where it won't execute each time the plugin is loaded
// since plugins are loaded each time a page is refreshed.
wp_schedule_single_event(time() + 86400, 'my_schedule_hook_name');

Hopefully this workaround that I’ve found will help you build more robust code. Please let me know how you go.