My WordPress blog broke because of the Post Teaser plugin
PHP, SandboxBlogger, WordPress July 6th, 2007Over the weekend, I was looking at the new features available in WordPress 2.2.1 and I thought “Hey, I really like the widget feature and I don’t need to install anything extra to get it if I upgrade SandBoxBlogger.com to the latest WordPress version.” Boy, how wrong can I be. Once I’ve enabled all the plugins, SandBoxBlogger.com was dead. I mean really dead. No error, no partial site, just a blank page. I was staring at a completely white page. Checking the source reviews that nothing loaded.
The little thought cost me the weekend debugging my blog. By disabling all the plugins and re-enabling them one by one, I’ve come to the conclusion that the problem was because of the Post Teaser plugin.
It was quite a disappointing experience because I really like the post-teaser plugin and now the plugin does not work anymore. I’d figure I’ll track down the plugin writer and report the problem. After finding the WordPress Plugin wiki and the project page for Post Teaser, I’ve found the author Jonathan Leighton. However, after looking at his site, I’ve found that Post Teaser was listed under the Projects in the past and his current projects are all Ruby on Rails. I’ve generally find it rude to ask Open Source developers to support past projects that they are not actively maintaining so I’d figure I’ll have a look and see if I can fix it. Who’d know that my second little thought cost me a lot more really late nights… Sigh.
I’m still trying to fix it so if anyone knows better please do give me a hint!
UPDATES: I’ve found that if I remove all the <!--more--> tags in all my post, the site is fine. Go figure. Luckily I don’t have a lot of post here. I would not recommend this solution to mature blogs with thousands of post and possibly hundreds of them have a <!--more--> tag.
UPDATES2: I’ve taken over the maintenance of Post Teaser and the problem with WP 2.2.x is fixed. The official post teaser page is now here: Post Teaser
September 17th, 2007 at 10:32 pm
I too was using post teaser and loved the fact it shortened all my category pages in the past since I would publish 20-30 fitness articles and I loved the fact the reader could scroll over the titles and preview and then click on what articles they want to read.
I hope you figure this out as I can;t wait to get this put back into my blog again and have it work properly.
Funny thing is that all the post contain the teaser and word count but at the end of the complete post 🙂
Good luck
Lewis
http://articles.atozfitness.com
September 18th, 2007 at 9:53 am
Lewis,
If I’m to guess, your post is either one long paragraph or you use <br /> instead of the <p> tag.
Post Teaser is paragraph aware. Meaning, it will find the closest paragraph break to the word count threshold as the cut-off point. If you have one long paragraph in your post, of course the closest paragraph break is the last because it is also the only paragraph break in your post. Similarly, if you use <br /> to break your paragraph, the whole post is treated as one paragraph.
However, if that is not the case, you may have found a legitimate bug. In that case, I will need to have some more information from you to solve the problem. Let me know if you need more help.
September 18th, 2007 at 10:50 pm
oh no 🙂
I was not aware of the versus I for sure have all ‘s in my postings and no way to gop and replace them with as I have 100’s of full page posted articles.
Do you have any suggestion on how I can still get this to work or is it now impossible without changing every single posting ?
all the best,
Lewis
September 19th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
Lewis,
I’m sorry but at the current state of Post Teaser, there is no easy way to fix your issue. I am considering adding a hard threshold feature but currently I have no time to implement it. I think this is one of the most complained features of Post Teaser users.
Watch this space for updates. I’m trying to get one upgrade out by the end of the year if possible. Better yet, subscribe to the feeds (SandboxBlogger RSS feed). This is the blog I use to make announcement for any Post Teaser related news.
May 26th, 2009 at 2:58 am
I’ve been using the Post Teaser plugin (based on the original 3.8 version) for a while and made an SEO version for my own use and my customers use (I sell AdSense/SEO WordPress themes) as a free download at http://www.google-adsense-templates.co.uk/wordpress-seo-plugins: my version works with ALL themes, so no one has to buy my themes to get the plugin to work :-).
I haven’t had the problems you’ve had with the original plugin, my modifications are pure SEO related not functionality, though I don’t use the more tag, so maybe got by the issue that way (not had a report of this problem either). Since I only made SEO changes there’s no reason why the original version (or my SEO version) wouldn’t work for many other WordPress users running 2.7, so for the poster having probs with br’s try the original.
I’ve read about your version of this great plugin and like the idea of it still being kept up to date (shame when a good plugin dies) and that you’ve added paragraph support (I never use br’s :)). From an SEO perspective breaking at the end of a full word is better than mid word like the original plugin, so will probably make both available on my site.
I’ve downloaded your plugin and it was very easy to SEO it, exact same code as the original that needed editing.
Anyway, glad to see someone has taken on this plugin, so if it breaks in future versions of WP I know where to come for a fix 😉
David Law
May 29th, 2009 at 12:03 am
Hi David,
For some reason your comment went straight into the spam box… I suspect the reason is the mention of SEO repeatedly. 😉
Anyway, the original problem I’ve mention is due to the change in WordPress 2.2.1 where they don’t consider plugin that is written to use PHP class feature and messed up really bad for quite a number of plugins. They have since fix the issue in the next version so, essentially, the version you have modified will work in every version of WordPress except for 2.2.1. The option page though is another story. It was broken since somewhere around 2.5 or 2.6
Thank you for the support.