BUG
I keep deleting my test posts to 20 admins, and they seem to delete. But when I reload the page, they come right back again. Not good
Hi,
Thanks for taking the time to leave your comments.
I personally don’t have a multi-site setup that I use for anything other than testing and admin access is pretty much myself and my wife (and a few friends I hog-tie into helping me test things). So, issues like this aren’t something that I encounter. Furthermore, if you read through these support posts you’ll read that limited multi-site support was added just recently (as in last week). It’s not something I ever originally intended for this plugin.
Regarding the 20 notes: When I wrote Note-Press, it was intended just for Admin use, there was no ability to send notes to others. So it had to be adapted. Basically, in order to write one note and send it to 20 recipients and allow them the ability to delete notes sent to them, requires one of two methods. Either 1 database table and 20 copies of the note, each with a different recipient or 2 database tables, 1 holding the note and the other the list of 20 recipients. I chose the former of those two for simple ease of use. Had I chose the latter it would have required a second list in order to view/edit/delete them. You’d have to find the note, then click on it to open a second list to see who had read it or to edit/delete it.
Note Press sat for almost 2 years with just the ability to send notes to all Admin. The ability to send notes to others was just added in the past couple of weeks. Any working solution is going to have limitations as a result of the WordPress interface. This, for now, is the easiest to implement and for the admin to see which notes have been sent.
In the future, I may adapt it so that admins do see the 1 note and click on it to see the list of recipients. But, that’s going to take a major rewrite and I’m in no rush to do that.
As for not deleting the notes. Yes, I just found this bug yesterday and a fix is already in the works and should be out this coming weekend. This occurs if you attempt to bulk-delete notes (clicking the check boxes). It’s not getting the proper security check so it doesn’t delete them. For the moment, you’ll have to hover over each note until the ‘view/edit/delete’ link shows and click on the delete to remove them individually.
I’ll add a comment to this thread when I release the next version with that fix.
Thanks for the prompt reply.
I understand your shortcut, but you’re talking about a huge about of data being generated on large sites. For a big site with large staffs (and numbers of roles), such as one we are building right now, that could be a lot of extra data for not much value.
Instead of deleting, perhaps you could hook the delete action (which I think exists) and just remove the recipient from the list instead of deleting? Then one note could be routed to multiple recipients without the data redundancy. Just a thought.
You are correct. There would be a lot of redundant data. Here was my thought. An admin would need to be able to see and delete any note. You can’t count on staff to delete their own. This would either require displaying a list of all notes, as it does now, or displaying a list of all unique notes with a link to a second list of recipients.
This second method means that in order to delete one note, it’s another layer deep. In order to delete all notes to a specific user you would need a third list just display that user’s notes.
This second method creates another problem. The notes would be ‘hard coded’ and couldn’t be edited by the recipient. In order to do so, the original note would need to be duplicated, that person removed from the recipient list and a new note created with them as the recipient so they could edit it.
The more I think about it, the more sense the current method makes. What would make this work better is for the admin to be able to filter the notes so that they could just see the ones from a specific user or to a specific user. That would reduce the clutter you’d see as an admin. Does that sound like a solution that might work on large sites?
For example you could set the filter to just see all notes sent by Susie to Joe.
No, because the clutter is only one problem. The data redundancy is the biggest problem. Some sites thousands, even millions of users. You’re talking out ridiculous amounts of data and table churn merely to save you some nettlesome coding. That doesn’t sound like sound direction to me.
And I am not sure why you think notes need to be “edited” to begin with. Sharing should be a function of the permissions a publisher grants recipient, if any. And you can always implement comments for a note.
I’m a designer, not a coder, but it doesn’t seem like a recipients table is a big deal. You’d keep a status flag for each recipient, showing read or unread, and only produce a list of those statuses on demand. (i.e. The Sender or admin lists the messages, and hovers over a status icon for a report like “50 still unread.” Click here for details.) I don’t have time to design a notes app, but I think if you spend a bit more time noodling the problem, or perhaps discuss it in some WP dev-chats, you can do better than redundant posts for each recipient.
Ok. If you have millions of visitors and you’re trying to use Note Press as a mass communications package then yes, you will have issues. Either way it’s done, the database will have the same number if rows. And if you don’t allow editing and do add comments, there’s another database table. The only difference will be the amount of data stored. More tables means more queries and more cpu cycles consumed. And if you have a staff so large that writing notes will create millions of rows in the table and gigs of data then Note Press is not for you.
If you are that concerned that your means of communicating with your staff is going to affect the front side of the website that much, then you have 2 choices: 1. External software like e-mail. 2. A custom plugin that doesn’t use the WordPress install database to store the communications.
Adapting Note Press to use an external database could be done. But, I’d be an utter fool to do so and release it for free when I could retire and just write plugins.
