Wordpress Plugin vs. Dashboard Stats

[swiftsnowmane@…]

Firestats ver: 1.5.12
Wordpress ver: 6.2.2
PHP: 5.2.5
MySQL: 4.1.20
Install: Satellite

Sample URL: http://www.timelordz.com/blog/?p=134[[BR]]

Hi there,

First off - Firestats is kick ass, I love it. Thank you for your time and effort developing this.

I have version 1.5.12 installed and it is working great monitoring my wiki and Wordpress blog. The wiki is site 1 and the blog site 2. Both record stats and seem to work fine.

I can view stats for the blog inside Wordpress (dashboard) and if I just access Firestats directly - all good.

However, the Wordpress Plugins themselves do not show any data - neither the stats plugin or the most popular posts which just says "No data yet, go get some hits"

Inside Wordpress, in Firestats Wordpress Settings - Advanced it shows site 2, which matches in Firestats databases.

I have looked through previous bug reports, but have not found one with this same issue - everything matches and works, but I can't figure out why the plugins show no data.

Thanks a lot for your help, and thanks for such a great app!

[omry]

Hi, sorry for the late response. somehow I missed the notification of this ticket.

this is very strange, can you send me a backup of your FireStats tables?

[anonymous]

Hi there,

No worries on the delay, thanks for taking a look. I could not upload the entire dump as it was too big (its just like 600K - don't worry :)

I put it up at: timelordz.com/scripts/firestats-pete.sql

It's not a super big deal, but it would be nice if I could get the Wordpress plugin working, mostly just to show off firestats (my blog traffic is not that impressive!)

Thanks for the great job on Firestats!

Cheers, Pete

[omry]

okay, got it. you can delete it from your server now. will take a look soon.

[omry]

I will also need the blog database to reproduce this locally. please email this one to me, as it's more sensitive.

[anonymous]

Hi there Omry,

Thanks for your emails back to me. I did see that you got it working fine in your test install with my data. Weird, just weird. It is being a real pain, and I greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.

I continued to work on this as well, and while the situation is somewhat changed there remain some odd similarities and I wanted to show you what I have now. Perhaps this should be a new ticket, but I think it makes sense keeping it on this one.

After your last email I tried again to get the Wordpress plug in working. I finally decided to just upgrade Wordpress to 2.7 and magically this fixed the issue - Tada! Everything was working fine.

You think I would have known better, but I then had the foolish idea to upgrade Firestats as well to 1.6. The upgrade itself was fine "Great Success!" - but I'm rather back where I started, but this time I was able to zero in on this some more.

(Note that Firestats itself works fine stand alone, and even inside Wordpress. The issues are mainly with the widgets. I even did a complete reinstall from the ground up of both Wordpress and Firestats, but still have two issues I can't quite get fixed.)

Specifics:

At Wordpress 2.7 upgrade and Firestats 1.5 everything was fine.

Upgraded Firestats to 1.6 using the Firestats Installer - Firestats itself worked (standalone) fine, but in Wordpress it was a bit weird. Reinstalled both WP and Firestats, however when the Firestats plugin is activated the folowing occurs:

1) All widgets are not displayed. When the blog loads the rest of the page content is displayed, but an error such as this was logged after every refresh:

[Sun Jan 11 12:43:43 2009] [notice] child pid 2078 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)

I parsed it in the shell to see what was seg faulting at saw this:

[root@tardis plugins]# php firestats-wordpress.php PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function get_option() in /home/.sites/28/site1/web/blog/wp-content/plugins/firestats /wordpress.php on line 326`

I changed that as below to manually set the path:

#$path = get_option('firestats_path'); CAUSING PHP Seg Fault $path = 'http://www.timelordz.com/firestats/';

2) In the main admin dashboard the "right now" and / or "Recent Comments" panels were not displayed.

When $path was set as above this also corrected this problem.

While I got the above two issues resolve, I really don't get why $path does not just work correctly, seems like it should.

However, the following issues I was unable to resolve:

3) When the Firestats plug-in is enabled, and I view the Appearance --> Widget screen, I can not view my sidebar_full or other sidebars. I click on "show", but nothing at all (not even the "This is Empty" message) is shown in the Sidebar column and the following is logged:

[Sun Jan 11 21:43:29 2009] [error] [client 72.184.x.y] PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function fs_e() in /home/.sites/28/site1/web/blog/wp-content/plugins/firestats-wordpress.php on line 915, referer: http://www.timelordz.com/blog/wp-admin/widgets.php?show=&sidebar=sidebar-1

Line 915 is:

<td><label for="firestats-title2"><?php fs_e('Title:')?> </label></td>

This does seem odd as I can not see where fs_e is defined.

(Note: This occurs despite the theme being used. I tried several themes and this was the case with all.)

4) When I attempt to configure the Firestats plugin in Wordpress (Settings --> Firestats) the page displays:

FireStats configuration FireStats detected at /home/.sites/28/site1/web/firestats/ FireStats was not found at http://www.timelordz.com/firestats

And this is logged:

[Sun Jan 11 21:45:47 2009] [error] [client 72.184.x.y] PHP Warning: file() [<a href='function.file'>function.file</a>]:URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration in /home/.sites/28/site1/web/blog/wp-content/plugins/firestats-wordpress.php on line 666, referer: http://www.timelordz.com/blog/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=FireStats [Sun Jan 11 21:45:47 2009] [error] [client 72.184.x.y] PHP Warning: file(http://www.timelordz.com/firestats/firestats.info) [<a href='function.file'>function.file</a>]: failed to open stream: no suitable wrapper could be found in /home/.sites/28/site1/web/blog/wp-content/plugins/firestats-wordpress.php on line 666, referer: http://www.timelordz.com/blog/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=FireStats

Based on these errors it looks like it needs url_fopen() enabled in php.ini, but I see in this similar ticket http://firestats.cc/ticket/792 that this error should not be critical - and I really would rather not enable fopen(). However, I can not configure anything past this point and the various Widgets are all blank and un-configurable.

So really, in summary:

The first two issues were resolved just by hard setting $path at line 326 in firestats-wordpress.php

The last two issue seems may be related, but I am a bit at a loss on them.

You have been a great help in working with me on this and I really appreciate it. I have donated once before and will again as this is such a great project. If you can provide any other insight on how I may be able to resolve the last two issue, and get Firestats displayed on my blog I would really appreciate it.

Thank you for your time and the great job you have done. Even though I am having trouble with the Wordpress Plugin / Widget, Firestats itself works fantastically well and is a great tool.

Cheers,

Pete Eby

[omry]

PHP should absolutely not segfault for any reason, no matter what atrocities the FireStats code performed.

Is this a standard PHP installation? which operating system? Do you have some fancy PHP security enhancement plugins or options active?

fs_e() is defined inside FireStats, if the FireStats code was correctly included - it should be accssible.

the forth problem is not a big issue, you can ignore it. FireStats attempts to verify that the FireStats in the path is the same as the one in the URL. and failed because of your PHP settings. since it's just a sanity check - it should work even without it as long as the url is correct.

"no suitable wrapper could be found" sounds like your PHP is not compiled with support for this particular protocol.

this again suggest that your PHP is non standard. I really think you should focus on getting your PHP fixed before attempting to fix FireStats.

[anonymous]

Hi there,

The funny thing is that PHP is the exact same version (5.2.5) and is pretty vanilla. Firestats was working fine before in the dashboard, just the widget wouldn't work.

Now, I can't get Firestats to track blog traffic at all, though it works fine with my wiki - so it works, and PHP works fine in general, but it is just not working with the wordpress plugin. It is set up with the right database, etc. but shows 0 traffic for the last few weeks.

I'm going to try to reinstall the plugin again. It was working in dashboard with my PHP previously so as that has not changed, I don't think that is it.

[Fri Jan 30 16:49:50 2009] [error] [client 72.184.x.y] PHP Warning: file() [<a href='function.file'>function.file</a>]:URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration in /home/.sites/28/site1/web/blog/wp-content/plugins/firestats-wordpress.php on line 666, referer: http://www.timelordz.com/blog/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=FireStats [Fri Jan 30 16:49:50 2009] [error] [client 72.184.x.y] PHP Warning: file(http://www.timelordz.com/firestats/firestats.info) [<a href='function.file'>function.file</a>]: failed to open stream: no suitable wrapper could be found in /home/.sites/28/site1/web/blog/wp-content/plugins/firestats-wordpress.php on line 666, referer: http://www.timelordz.com/blog/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=FireStats

Does firestats need url_fopen() enabled in php.ini? I never enable this and it was working before this this disabled, so I don't think this is it.

I'll let you know what I find. Thanks again for your help.

[anonymous]

Wow - now I am just plain lost.

Did a complete reinstall of firestats. Tried using both the firestats-installer and doing a manual install.

If I use the installer, I end up with it working in WP dashboard, but the stand alone version displays 0 hits for my blog. But the plugin version displays hits correctly. Both are configured to use the right site identifier.

Just for fun I just copied the firestats/ directory from wp-content/plugins to my site document root - same.

The best results I can get are that it works in wp but no matter what I try I can't get it to work standalone. Attaches to database fine and sees new hits on another site, but no new hits on blog. Then I go into the wp dashboars and see new hits on blog.

I must admin - this is extremely weird.

[omry]

the firestats installer created firestats tables inside the wordpress database. it's not meant to be used with the standalone version.

since you made a little mess, and it sounds like you don't care much about the FireStats data, the best thing to do would be:

• drop all firestats tables. including those in the WordPress database.
• remove all firestats keys from the wp_options table of your WordPress. (keys that have firestats in their name).
• install FireStats standalone and then install the firestats-wordpress.php in WordPress wp-content/plugins and configure FireStats to use the standalone installation.

your segfault may be caused by php running out of memory. try to increase the memory limit in php.ini.

[omry]

I assume this a problem specific to your server.

[anonymous]

Replying to omry:

I assume this a problem specific to your server.

Interesting I've got the exact same problem. I'm going to try re-installation.

[anonymous]

Hey there,

I finally got around to working on this - thank you. You were correct, the lack of new hits being recorded was simply a matter of dropping the tables from the Wordpress database that the Firestats Installer had added. All hits are being tracked again.

I also upgraded from 1.6.0 to 1.6.2. I did just want to note however that I am still seeing one odd thing - it just prevents me from using the plugin in Wordpress, though all traffic is properly recorded. I only mention this as I see another person reported they were seeing the same issue earlier in this ticket.

The problem I am still seeing is:

When the Firestats plug-in is enabled, and I view the Appearance --> Widget screen, I can not view my sidebar_full or other sidebars. I click on "show", but nothing at all (not even the "This is Empty" message) is shown in the Sidebar column and the following is logged:

[Sun Jan 11 21:43:29 2009] [error] [client 72.184.x.y] PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function fs_e() in /home/.sites/28/site1/web/blog/wp-content/plugins/firestats-wordpress.php on line 915, referer: http://www.timelordz.com/blog/wp-admin/widgets.php?show=&sidebar=sidebar-1

Line 915 is:

<td><label for="firestats-title2"><?php fs_e('Title:')?> </label></td>

This does seem odd as I can not see where fs_e is defined.

(Note: This occurs despite the theme being used. I tried several themes and this was the case with all.)

Not a huge deal, but it does prevent the Wordpress plugin for functioning and stops widgets from being displayed. Again, I only mention it as another users is reporting the same, otherwise I guess I would write it off to some nebulous aspect for my environment.

Firestats ver: 1.6.2 Wordpress ver: 2.8 PHP: 5.2.5 MySQL: 4.1.20 Install: Satellite

Thanks, Pete

[anonymous]

Oops - in addition to the above the new 1.6.2 Wordpress plugin does not actually record hits in the database. If I roll back to the 1.6.0 one it does record, but of course there is a message there is a version mismatch between Firestats and the Wordpress plugin.

Regardless of which version of the plugin is used the above issue remains with the Wordpress Widgets not being displayed.

I thought I had it to a working point, but it looks like I don't. Oh well, it was worth a shot.

I do appreciate the assistance you have provided, thanks.

Pete

[omry]

Pete, please open a different ticket. I don't think it has anything to do with the problem in this ticket.