Was just curious why MainWP would throw an error of “Invalid Plugin Slug” when looking at the changelog for a particular plugin (in my case it’s Bricks Extras).
Has anyone ever come across “Invalid Plugin Slug” before for any other plugins? Any idea where I should start troubleshooting this kind of issue?
Error seen in my logs when I try to load the changelog for this plugin:
Sep 23 11:49:3870.78.216.26 - - [23/Sep/2023:18:49:38 +0000] "GET /wp-admin/plugin-install.php?tab=plugin-information&wpplugin=19&plugin=Plugin&url=&name=BricksExtras§ion=changelog HTTP/1.1" 500 2562 "https://{MainWPHostname}/wp-admin/admin.php?page=UpdatesManage" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.0 Safari/605.1.15"
It seems like a valid slug from what I can tell, the plugin folder is named bricksextras which is the name used in the URL above.
This is a premium plugin, so the plugin author should offer the correct information to follow WordPress standards. You can find more information and an instruction you can send to the plugin author:
Ah yes I’m aware of that KB and have provided that to them before. Usually though if developers haven’t done that properly I find that MainWP just shows a blank changelog page, but this one is a legitimate error message so I assumed it was due to a different root cause. But perhaps the behaviour has just changed a bit over recent MainWP updates. I’ve let the developer know of this already but they aren’t yet aware of anything wrong. Still looking into it.
My original discussion was closed very quickly with what I believe to be an unconfirmed solution. This was unfortunately premature so now I need to create a follow-up post instead so more people can find this in the future.
As a quick update: This does indeed appear to be a different issue than previous issues where the changelog simply appears with a blank/empty box, since this one is specifically throwing an error of “Invalid plugin slug”.
Interestingly, based on a comment from the developer of that plugin when I brought this concern to their attention, it was suggested that I install the plugin on the MainWP Dashboard site as they noticed that behaviour themselves and and it worked properly after installing it on the MainWP Dashboard site, the changelog loaded as expected and no more “Invalid plugin slug” error messages.
I’ve asked them for more details as they investigate but I’m curious from the MainWP team why this would be necessary? Presumably they’re already using the documented APIs from your KB article since the changelog does appear correctly when it’s installed on the MainWP Dashboard site. So it seems there’s something else to this issue than what the KB article was addressing.
For what it’s worth, I have a suspicion it is related to me having BricksExtras on the MainWP Dashboard site a long time ago, and perhaps MainWP still thinks its installed and tries to load it locally before realizing it doesn’t exist anymore? I can reproduce the behaviour… without the plugin installed on the MainWP Dashboard site I get the “Invalid plugin slug” error message when looking at the changelog, but when it’s installed then it loads the changelog perfectly fine. It’s almost as if MainWP is looking local first because it existed at one point in time, but not sure how correct that is. Would appreciate your insights to explain this behaviour.
PS - @Dennis, I believe because you marked @josklever’s comment as the solution, the forum software auto-closed it within 24 hours. Few concerns with this… it was marked as solved when it wasn’t fully addressed yet (this was premature IMO, and ideally reasonable time should be given to the OP for marking something as solved before assuming it is), and the forum software’s 24 hour auto-close setting seems far too short as it removes the ability for a user to ask follow-up questions or add more details to the issue which in-turn hurts people from finding it in the future. Please consider maybe increasing the auto-close behaviour from 24 hours to at least 72 hours or ideally even longer. Not everyone can check the issue every single day to reply quickly especially if it’s not an urgent matter.
I agree that the first post was closed too quickly, so I hope that @dennis can think about to handle this better.
However I still believe that the plugin doesn’t have the correct way to show the changelog. I’m not a developer and don’t know how to check this, but maybe one of the MainWP developers can check the code, if you can send them a copy of the plugin.
This is indeed unusual behavior. The ability to view the plugin’s changelog, premium or not, should not be affected by having it installed on the MainWP Dashboard.
Indeed, if the plugin developer has implemented the changelogs using standard WP hooks as explained in this KB that @josklever linked in the previous thread, the changelog should be visible.
Would you mind opening a private Help Desk ticket so we can take a closer look at the Bricks Extra plugin?
And please refer to this Managers thread by its URL in the ticket.
As for the automatic thread closing after 24h - our apologies for marking the previous thread as complete prematurely. I have now merged the two threads and re-opened the original one.
We’ll pay closer attention to the thread dynamics in the future, and we’ll take the advice for increasing the auto-close time into consideration.
Thank you, @Bojan. I’ve submitted the support ticket (#24173) with the BricksExtras plugin as well. Hoping that helps narrow this down. If I learn of any updates from the BricksExtras team too, I will be sure to update you.
