Graceful Failure Handling

[Mason Wolf]

I originally posted this under feature requests, but really it should be a bug report.

When a feed is, for any reason, unable to load, I would like to receive a warning to the administrator email address, so I can check on the feed URL and find out if it’s changed. But I’d like the experience of the website viewer to be unaffected – basically, they should continue to see the (previously cached) events from the compromised feed, and not be shown php error messages that reveal both the URL of the broken feed and the line and class name where the error occurred while attempting to parse. I don’t want that information exposed inadvertently, and it’s a bad experience generally. Plus, I have no way of knowing, unless I’m the one to encounter the error, that anything is wrong with my calendar.

This is a huge bug, in my opinion. The plugin is beautiful, but surprisingly brittle.

Thank you in advance.

[room34]

Thank you for these suggestions.

I would like to note however that the error reporting as it is currently configured is fairly standard (notification emails are NOT a standard feature of most plugins, unless there’s a fatal error which would trigger the standard WordPress notification).

I would also like to point out that these errors only display to users if you have WP_DEBUG turned on, which is not recommended on production sites.

[Mason Wolf]

The message that I saw only showed up the first time I loaded the affected page after the feed became broken, and not after. The WP_DEBUG paramater is set to false. This message displayed inside of standard text on the screen, and not inside the typical modals that wordpress uses for debugging. I believe you can reproduce this issue yourself without too much effort, but please let me know if I can assist.

As for sending an email, I believe that will be necessary in the event that graceful failure is implemented successfully, as otherwise, there may not be any indication that the feed has stopped updating. I realize it’s not a common practice for plugins, but I believe it should be possible, based on how many other plugins occasionally need to send me email.

[room34]

If PHP error messages are showing anywhere on your site, then the PHP setting display_errors is turned on; WP_DEBUG is not the only way this can happen. It may be set in your wp-config.php or .htaccess file, or it may be in your server’s php.ini file.

I’m sorry that you are getting error messages like this, but ICS Calendar’s handling of reporting errors, as I’ve noted, is fairly routine. The only reason any of these error messages is ever getting displayed to users is due to the display_errors setting which is incorrect for a production server.

[Author]

Posts