WP-Members 3.0 Update Information

First of all, thanks to everyone who downloaded the plugin over the past two days. And thank you for feedback on any issues.

I’ve tried to make sure that any issues were addressed as quickly as possible in order to provide a smoother transition to the new version.

3.0.0.1 was released within hours of the initial launch to address a logic flaw that effected the user profile page shortcode.

3.0.0.2 was released during the first day launch to address an issue with the login form shortcode that turned that form off if the login form setting was off (the shortcode should have been unaffected by the setting). This release also fixed a bad path name for the reCAPTCHA library.

Both of these fix releases were not to difficult to track down once users reported the problems and I was able to get the issues resolved in a short period of time.

3.0.0.3 was released to fix three problems:

1. The first problem was issues with Custom Post Types (CPTs). 3.0 was intended to include native support for CPTs. Up until now, CPTs could be blocked, but some custom functions needed to hook into the wpmem_block filter. I did quite a bit of testing with CPTs and intended all of the Page and Post settings for the plugin to also allow settings for CPTs. Unfortunately, this didn’t work out so well in the wild. Thanks to the users who reported these issues. For now, I’ve rolled back this support. So even though CPTs will not be supported yet, on the bright side, that’s no different than the plugin as it existed two days ago. If you need native CPT support, please be patient. It will be included when I am able to rework the problem.

2. The second problem addressed was with sorting custom user columns. 3.0.0 included a class to allow any custom WP-Members custom fields that are included in the Users > All Users screen to be sortable. Unfortunately, as written, it did not display non-WP-Members custom fields. So this is being rolled back until I can correct the problem at which point I’ll reintroduce it.

Up to this point, the previous two fix releases and the first two fixes mentioned in 3.0.0.2 were all relatively minor. Once apparent and reported, I was able to resolve them quickly.

3. The third issue addressed in 3.0.0.2 was not as readily apparent and was trickier to figure out. This is the one thing that I think frustrated most users who worked with the update initially. Please understand that this was equally as frustrating for me. Just like you, I want the update process to go smoothly and without issue. And for many, it did. But for others, there was a problem with the new settings array being loaded, which would lead to what appeared to be a broken install unless of course you then manually set the settings, in which case the new array would be there and the errors would go away.

This should not have been occurring. I reviewed the install script and everything was as it should have been. All of the functions were there and correct. And all testing resulted in a valid result. But I discovered the problem when testing prior to finishing up the 3.0.0.3 fix.

When the plugin was updated by the the link in the plugin page for the individual plugin “There is a new version of WP-Members available. View version 3.0.0 details or update now” it did not run the install script that (1) checks to see if this is an update or a new install and then (2) updates the settings to the new settings format if the settings were in the 2.x format.

Without this process being run, there would be no valid settings. This resulted in login and registration forms disappearing, no stylesheets, essentially anything that was in the main options tab. Worse, if you had debug mode turned on or you run php with strict/all messaging, you got a screen full of warning messages of invalid indexes.

If the settings were manually set from this point, all this went away. But (1) it should not have been that way, and (2) not everyone knows that intuitively.

Let me take a moment and say that this only occurred if the plugin was updated in the exact method I described above. If the plugin was updated by checking the box and selecting update from the bulk menu OR if it was updated from the Updates screen in the dashboard menu, then everything went fine – clean install.

Once I was able to identify that problem, I was able to include a solution. For now, the new plugin class that loads the settings before anything else will check to see if the new settings exist. If they do, great, nothing to see here. But if they don’t, it will run the update script accordingly. This will only happen once – essentially when any page is loaded after the invalid update. From there, the settings will be fine.

For everyone who had that issue, I thank you for your patience. For everyone that gave me issue reports, I thank you for helping out – I could not have gotten these things worked out without your assistance.

And if you had an issue with one of the early releases (especially the last item I mentioned above), please give 3.0.0.3 a try. All known issues at this point have been fixed.

On a positive note, all of this was released, reported, and fixed over a very short period of time, and as soon as issues were known. This was during a very busy time for the plugin as the last two days represented the first and third largest single day downloads for the plugin ever.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-members/