[Steve Scott]

A couple of days ago I paid to renew support for Slim Plus. There was a “Purchase ID” number provided with the confirmation that I first assumed was a new license key for Slim Plus, so I entered that in the “Licenses” area in Connections settings, but got an error message. At that point I reverted back to the original Slim Plus license key. Now, however, I see the error messages shown in the attached image from the Plugins area of the Dashboard. These error messages persist after multiple attempts to (re-) “activate” the license keys for Slim Plus and ROT13.

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[Steven Zahm]

@ Steve

Could I please get a temp admin login so I can look into this deeper? Right now I have no guesses as to why you get this error so I need to see this on your site in order to debug. The login details can be posted here as a private reply. Thanks!

[Steve Scott]

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[Steven Zahm]

@ Steve

I get an invalid login error when I try to login. Could you please verify the login details?

[Steve Scott]

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[Steven Zahm]

@ Steve

I updated the code a bit to display more low level error messages rather than grouping them all under an “unkown error” message.

You’ll see the actual error is cURL error 28: Connection timed out after 10001 milliseconds.

This is a low level error message being reported by WordPress which basically means, “no internet available on the hosting server”. According to the system info allow_url_fopen and cURL are enabled and supported but it still seems something is blocking external connections made by the core WordPress function wp_remote_get().

I am pretty certain at this point that this seems to be a webhost issue. Can you contact the webhost support to see if they are blocking external connections?

[Steve Scott]

I have forwarded your message to our hostmaster, who is usually pretty responsive. I’ll let you know what he says.

I’m not having similar trouble with any other plugins, and FWIW the site just automatically updated to the latest WordPress version.

I noticed when I logged in this time and went to the plugins page that there was a noticeable pause for ROT13 and Slim Plus before they separately displayed the new error message and the rest of the page displayed.

In any event, Connections and the Slim Plus template appear to be working properly on the front end.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Steve

re: I have forwarded your message to our hostmaster, who is usually pretty responsive. I’ll let you know what he says.

Looking forward to find out the reply you receive. Hopefully it is a simple switch they can click!

re: I noticed when I logged in this time and went to the plugins page that there was a noticeable pause for ROT13 and Slim Plus before they separately displayed the new error message and the rest of the page displayed.

Right, that pause is WordPress attempting to connect to my site to check the license status. After a connection is made the response is cached for a day. The status check will not normally cause a noticeable delay but since WordPress has to wait, that causes the slight pause.

In case you are wondering… this was added to the Plugins admin page because I noticed only a small percentage of users took time to activate their support license therefore not benefitting from the updates are released. When they notice there is an update and attempt to do so, they’ll receive an error which generally results in them asking what the error is and how to fix it.

So I believe this will be very helpful while being subtle without be obnoxious (like many other commercial plugin which put their notices on the top of, every, admin page).

re: In any event, Connections and the Slim Plus template appear to be working properly on the front end.

Right, the license activation only affects the ability to run in admin updates. All other functionality will work just fine. I’ve run into a couple plugins which would stop working completely if the license was not valid/expired. I feel that is a little unfriendly so I do not add that type of limitations.

[Steve Scott]

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[Steven Zahm]

@ Steve

Well, that’s unfortunate! There’s nothing I can do about that. Since I dev for WP, guess that obvious, I use the WordPress API’s. In this case I use wp_remote_get() function and then WordPress does it’s best using various methods to try to make the remote request.

I suspect since PHP reports that cURL is available WordPress tries to use it but times out because the host is actually blocking it.

Perhaps the host should change the server config to report that cURL is not available and WordPress might try another method.

Honestly, I’d have to dig deep into the WordPress API to learn exactly what it defaults to and what the fallbacks are … but the sum of it is, that I can not simply switch out cURL for ccurl as the host suggests. The only way to do that would be to edit the core WordPress files directly which is a big nono because it can break all sorts of things. And the changes would be lost anytime you update WP too. Just not a good practice. The only alternative I would have would to to completely write my own API for remote connections but that is extremely overtkill since WP already provides one.

My suggestion … request that your host open curl for you.

Hope that helps!

ps. A quick scan of the WordPress code… version 4.6 uses wp_remote_get() 14 times for internal functions so my guess is unless the host “whitelisted” those specifically somehow, those are failing too.

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