Support

September 5, 2014 at 10:31 am

Hi Dana,

I’m Event Espresso’s lead developer and I just finished investigating your site.

I specifically looked at what’s called the $_REQUEST array which is a list of parameters and values that get passed from a user’s browser to the server. Think of it like putting in an order at a restaurant. The customer gives their order to the wait staff (the browser) which then delivers the order to the kitchen (the server). When the order gets to the kitchen, the various menu items are cooked up by the chef that’s responsible for that item, so in this example you can think of Event Espresso as being one of the cooks in the kitchen.

So what did I see when I looked at the incoming order ?

On the event pages that work correctly, the order was exactly as it should be, but on the events that are not working… the order was empty.

Now just to clarify… the code I added to look at the incoming request was added at the very top of the very first Event Espresso file that WordPress runs, so in other words, it was the very first bit of Event Espresso code to run. The fact that the incoming request was empty at that point means that the error is happening somewhere BEFORE Event Espresso even comes into the picture. So this is definitely NOT an Event Espresso problem. The chef is receiving an empty order from the wait staff.

If this issue happened with every single event, then I would suspect that some other plugin, or even your theme, was somehow erasing the contents of the incoming request, but since it is only on certain events and not others, then it is most likely a result of some sort of server caching. It’s possible that somebody at some point turned on a caching program that has saved the output for those specific event pages. Like saving a copy of customer orders for specific tables in the restaurant. The problem though, is that the Ticket Selector submits it’s details to that same page via additional request parameters, but the server caching jumps in and says “Ya we already know what the order for table 12 is!” and then returns the exact same page, ignoring the additional request parameters.

So if caching is activated directly through your hosting, then you will need to ensure that it is turned off for all event registration pages so that dynamic data can be submitted. It would also be advisable to clear any existing cached files. If caching was previously set up via a WordPress plugin, then you may need to re-install that plugin again, so that you can clear any cached pages.

My guess is that it was a WordPress plugin considering the fact that there is a folder in your wp-content directory named “cache”. No caching plugins appear to be currently installed, so you will need to find out which one it was and re-install it.

Hope this helps.