Does anyone have the contact info for the original Dev that created the Broken Link Checker Extension for Main WP (heck it might be the Main WP folks)? I personally find this plugin VERY useful but the latest version on GitHub from Summer 2021 (GitHub - 7thcirclegit/mainwp-broken-links-checker-extension) has issues for me when retrieving URLs from child sites. Summary info does retrieve properly but I don’t “see” the actual links in my dash since the URL database is blank/not populated due to a PHP error in the code that writes to the database (this may not be the only issue - unsure).
While I would prefer having Main WP Pro bring back/update this extension considering that Manage WP, Infinite WP, WPMUDEV and pretty much every other competitor has a link checker I am willing to pay someone on Fiverr to fix the URL listings because other then this Main WP Pro is awesome for us.
If the original developer isn’t available does anyone have Fiverr recommendations for someone that knows Main WP extension that could possibly help fix these URL retrieval errors and/or update it? I’d be happy to share this back to the community via a Pull but I also don’t want to pay an arm and a leg to get this fixed (I’m not a PHP Developer but I have poked around a bit and I think I see where the issues are).
Thanks in advance for any input and YES I know there was another thread about this (Bring Back Broken Link Checker) so hopefully people are not offended if this seems to be duplicate content. Thanks again.
I have the same issue and so do several other people. When I updated the plugin, I only addressed the issues that were throwing errors (hook names I believe) and preventing the plugin from activating correctly. For my needs it is working fine, but I would like to see someone take over and maintain the plugin.
My needs for it are less about fixing the links on my dashboard and more about knowing that there are issues that I need to address on the child sites. The plugin on the child sites is the issue in my opinion since it does have a lot of false failures especially with YouTube, Cloudflare, and Amazon
Understood @7thcircle and I really appreciate the work you have done to get it to this point.
I have found a PHP Developer on Fiverr that believes they can fix the issue with importing all URLs (including broken) from the plugin on child sites (maintained by WPMUDEV) into dash using the broken link checker extension/plugin. They are working on this now in a staging environment I setup for my MainWP dashboard. If (hopefully when) they fix this I am planning to share the coding updates with the community and would prefer to just share it via your Github since the most recent version lives there (do I just do a “pull” request?).
Fingers crossed.
As I have already said a few times, it is interesting to me that the Main WP Pro Devs seem to have no interest in updating or maintaining the broken link check extension plugin and/or adding this functionality back into Main WP even though most, if not all, of their competitors offer broken link checker functionality on their dashboards. I wish @dennis or someone else from the Dev team would comment on why they don’t consider this functionality essential and/or necessary.
This Extension was retired, in January 2020, so I’m not even sure it will work on the current dashboard and I am not seeing any requests for it on the feedback board.
First step would be to make an offical request on the Feedback Board then we can see what kind of votes it gets and then we can work it into the Roadmap.
If you have your own developer ready to work on it you can have them look on the dev site at https://mainwp.dev for examples and current code.
Thanks for the feedback @dennis . We will have to see what my Fiverr Developer comes up with but from what I can tell the core functionality works with the current dashboard. I cannot test URL lists (broken, etc) as this data is not properly populated in the URL database due to a PHP error on writing to the URL db. However, status info is properly populated into that database. Core functionality (dash status, overview screens, etc) does work in the current dashboard.
In addition to the longer post called “Bring Back Broken Link Checker” that I originally contributed to there have been a few other posts asking about this
Given this interest it is odd that there is no official request on the Feedback Board about this so I will remedy that situation. As I have also mentioned, all main competitors include link checking in their core products (I will not provide the links here for obvious reasons) so to me this is core functionality. Also, as I have noted - I LOVE MainWP and we are basing our entire WordPress update cycles around your Pro product now so beyond this feature I love, love, love your product.
Given that the Main WP broken link checker extension appears to “mostly” properly communicate with the broken link checker plugin when installed child sites if you maintained this methodology it would initially appear to be trivial to renew support for this plugin (time will tell). While there is some disagreement about whether the broken link checker works effectively on child sites it does have 700,000 active installs - Broken Link Checker – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org.
I will post a feature request shortly (maybe not today but by early next week). I will also keep everyone updates on what my hired Dev figures out and will give him the info you shared from your Dev site.