Strange Wordpress Plugin Behaviour
Message
 

Guys, on the surface, the wordpress plugin appears to work just fine, however, when you dig deeper and deeper, you find it to be quite unresponsive. What specifically am I talking about, well, the application and registration processes. On the surface they work, and they do, in fact, produce results. Registrants and applications are visible via in CATS. However, what doesn't occur is the importing of account related details via the wordpress site.

For example, when you have created an account, it says it will allow you to track the jobs you have applied for etc... BUT, the only thing that ever loads in the Wordpress site itself is a list of new/active job orders.

Now, if I access the CATS version of the application process and account from the email that was auto-generated and sent to me, it very clearly shows me the jobs I have applied for and it allows me to do a variety of other things, like edit my account, etc...

Anyone want to take a whack at figuring out where the disconnect is? I've also noticed that despite signing in, the Wordpress side of the site is continually asking for a login, yet the CATS hosted version of our career portal doesn't.

If I'm not making myself clear, let me know and I'll try to expand.

Here are the links:

http://www.smartdws.com/smart-v3/?page_id=83 - Our Wordpress Portal

http://smartdws.catsone.com/careers/index.php - CATS Portal

 

I also just discovered that clicking on this link:

http://www.smartdws.com/smart-v3/?cc=show&page_id=&id=171561

It takes you to the start page of the site and not to the actual job order - this is a link on the CATS Portal version of the active jobs listing.

 

Lost in the shuffle?

 
The poster of the following message is an official representative of CATS.

Tony,

Sorry about the late response, I've been meaning to call you about this for some clarification; but after reading your post again and playing around on your WP site, I found what you mean.

It appears to be caused by cookies not being saved. For example, if you check out http://wordpress.catsbeta.com and register/login, you'll notice all the same functionality for viewing past jobs, editing your profile, etc. still exist as on our hosted version. In fact, there's actually more functionality with the ability to view your formatted resume in HTML and to update it with a new document.

Because your site isn't showing this and also isn't saving field data, I checked my Firefox developer extension and the cookies definitely aren't present like they are on our test site.

I have a few ideas to debug this. First of all, give me a list of any other WP plugins that you're running, especially any that do caching as they tend to cause problems. You could even try temporarily disabling them and then testing the process.

Secondly, there's some commented code in the WP folder: wp-content/plugins/cats-jobsite/cats_cms.php on line 40 that looks like:

//ini_set('error_reporting', E_ALL);

If you remove the "//" and then try reloading it will spew out any errors that you might be missing. If you copy and paste those here they might lead to something. This also might be located in your php errors file (if enabled).

 

I've got 'Add to Facebook', 'Twitter Tools' & 'Twitter This' installed as additional plug-ins. The CATS Plugin issue was happening prior to them being installed, but I deactivated as you suggested and didn't have any more luck with it than I did prior.

I also removed the commenting on Line 40 so that error reporting could occur, nothing was displayed on the site itself however.

PHP Error Logging isn't enabled, I'll look into getting that running as well. In the meantime, with the plugins turned off, maybe you could take another run through.

Would giving you access to the WP back end be of any use?

 
The poster of the following message is an official representative of CATS.

Tony,

First, just a heads up. I've moved this post to the Developer's Corner. With all the posts we get in the support area it's real easy for me to miss replies you post here, plus it's more suited for that forum anyway.

Second, getting access will help, let's just try one more thing first. Near that line I told you to uncomment, put the following:

phpinfo();
die();

Then, refresh the page, save it and email it to me at andrew [at] catsone.com [dot] com. That will tell me all of your php and settings. I'd like to read through that quick and see if anything looks off.

 

Did all you asked Andrew... ...email should be in your inbox.

Let me know if you want access to the WP-Admin section. I'll email that over if you do.

 

Andrew,

Did you get the email?

We're getting anxious over here trying to get the site launched.

Tony

 
The poster of the following message is an official representative of CATS.

Very strange Tony. I looked through it up and down and am not seeing where this could be happening. Basically, the gist of the problem appears to be that everything is getting processed ok, the session cookie server files that stores that the candidate has logged in is getting a) deleted, b) never created, or c) reset. In your log the cookie does exist on your client, so it just must not be correlating to the server files.

In the CATS WordPress plugin folder on your server, in the "cache" sub-directory, are there files there with the format: "sess_(random text).ser"?

After reviewing the plugin code, it doesn't throw an error if it's unable to create a server session file, so what might be happening is that cache folder has some bad permissions set or PHP isn't allowed to write those files, or something to that extent.

 

Andrew,

The 'cache' sub-directory has permissions set to 755. Is that correct? It makes sense that it would be, but if I need to change it let me know.

The directory itself is empty. I've got it set to show 'invisible' files as well and there is still nothing in it. I'm going to try running a log in session and try to refresh the directory phase by phase to see if it writes anything in.

I'll let you know.

FTP access is possible if you need it.

Tony Djukic

 

Did a registration test run and the directory remains empty the entire time...

I'm guessing this has something to do with the fact that we're running a Mac Pro and OS X Server as the primary web machine. I imagine the settings may need to be tweaked.

Thoughts?

 
The poster of the following message is an official representative of CATS.

Let's see if we can get some errors to fire to help explain what's going on. First, make sure that the ini_set at the top of catscms.php is still uncommented (no // in front). Then,

on line 489 of libs/Utility.php '@file_put_contents...', change it to:

if (!file_put_contents($file, serialize($obj)))
{
throw new CATS_E_FILEACCESS();
}

Then, try logging in as a candidate and see if you have any error messages pop up that can help explain what's going on.

P.S.: The plug-in uses a lot of caching which makes it very fast and reduces API requests considerably. This problem is also affecting that, which is why the pages are loading rather slowly. Once we get this worked out, page load times will be close to instant.


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