My First Contribution to WordPress

While it’s not an official contribution to WordPress, I did discover and fix an issue within a plugin I installed earlier today on my WordPress MU 2.7 installation. Apparently, WordPress MU 2.7 introduced the concept of registering and “whitelisting” any options that can be set for your plugin within the administration center. From the documentation on the WordPress Codex, this is something that will be coming soon in WordPress itself.

Anyway, I installed a plugin called “Events Manager” this morning and proceeded to attempt to edit the options for the plugin. I got everything the way I wanted it and pressed the “Save” button, only to be confronted with an error that said something along the lines of “Error! Options page not found.” Frustrated, I started to Google the issue and found very little help.

Finally, I came across this post on the WordPress Support Forums, which led me to this blog post, which led me to this entry in the WordPress Codex. After looking at the Codex documentation along with the examples posted in the other two links I just provided, I figured out that I needed to “register” the settings for the plugin. I made some code changes, one at a time, and proceeded to test the changes I made. Finally, I got it working the way it is supposed to.

I then popped on over to the plugin developers Web site and posted a comment with my issue and the solution I found. He and I shot a few e-mails back and forth shortly after I posted the issue, and he ended up posting my information in the “Known Issues” section of his plugin page. He also thanked me for making him aware of the new requirements that will be coming in future versions of WordPress, and said that he will make sure to work on them before he releases the all-new version of the Events Manager plugin in a few weeks.

So, although I haven’t developed a plugin, myself, yet; nor have I actually contributed any code or bugfixes to the main WordPress project, I did provide a simple fix for anyone trying to use Events Manager 1.0.1 on a WordPress MU installation, and most likely helped a plugin developer prepare his plugin for the next generation of WordPress.

That, my friends, is just one of the beauties of open-source development.

3 Responses

  • Good job, Curtiss!

  • Allen

    very cool Curtiss – thanks for sharing the story – great to see that you didn’t just fix it for yourself but helped others with the same issue.

  • And a massive thanks from the developer or Events Manager :) Your fantastic debugging job has spared me many future headaches. Anyway, I fixed the bug in EM 2.0, to be launched next week; this release should work seamlessly in Wp Mu; if it doesn’t, let me know. Thanks again, Davide