A couple of issues with Map View and Search Functions

[shawntarlo]

Sorry Barry I cannot seem to see it, I logged out and back in as well with no luck.

[Barry]

Thanks for your patience.

All of the expected meta data seems to be present with the exception of the longitude and latitude values, which explains what you’re seeing. What we need to figure out is why that isn’t being recorded.

At code level, it seems that one fairly clear possibility is that the system is not able to reach the Google Maps API (or receives an unsatisfactory or no response). It’s possible such a thing could be the result of various restrictions in your hosting environment – and this might also explain why we aren’t seeing widespread reports of this across our user base.

Can you provide any information about your hosting environment (who is the host and what sort of package is it, a regular shared hosting package or self-managed VPS, etc)? Do you have an alternate environment – perhaps even running locally on your own computer – and can you see the same problem there?

Thanks!

[shawntarlo]

I believe you may be on to something with the hosting concerns. We run our development sites (all of them) on Rackspace Cloud Sites (more info: http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/sites/). I can migrate to a regular run of the mill shared hosting environment but that would take some time so only if absolutely necessary :D. Let me know if you feel that is necessary.

[Barry]

Ideally we’d avoid a wholesale migration – but it would be nice to confirm if this was indeed the problem and perhaps tweak the hosting environment to solve things without further disruption.

I’m guessing you have access to support in order to troubleshoot hosting problems (even if WordPress or plugin-specific issues are out of scope) … with that in mind can you enquire and ask if anything is set up that would impede communication with maps.googleapis.com? Our code simply uses the WordPress API to facilitate this (ultimately, behind the scenes, WordPress in turn attempts to use cURL and falls back upon PHP streams to facilitate this).

It’s not impossible that suitable streams are not available and nor is the php5-curl extension – in which case WordPress’s options for communicating with remote APIs would be pretty limited and our own attempts to use Google’s geocoding would consequently fail. If that is the case, though, I would hope they could remedy the situation fairly easily.

Can you relay this to the service provider and see if it results in anything?

[Barry]

On a side topic, I’m sorry you couldn’t see the private reply – looks like unfortunately that is another glitch we still need to fix with the new support system.

Essentially though I wanted to convey our sincere apologies about the delay in providing support. If we can make things up to you by offering you a coupon for a future license renewal, or perhaps a complimentary license for one of our other products, please email us at pro (at) tri (dot) be and let us know your preference – if you could also include a link back to this thread so that the person handling emails sees the context of the request that would be awesome.

Thanks!

[shawntarlo]

Hi Barry thanks for the quick responses, it is much appreciated. I have talked with support regarding the issue, and they do not know of anything specifically which would cause communication issues within their environment but they were amendment to point that they are not developers so they dont know specifically if their would be limits with Google maps.

I have enabled you to view the PHP info for the site here (http://multisite.cruxsketchpad.com/phpinfo.php), in case it is of some use. I will now see about cloning the site to a new shared hosting platform.

[shawntarlo]

Hi Barry so I have finally launched a new site on another hosting platform, unfortunately however I was not able to migrate the site in question so I am not sure how much it helps us troubleshoot. But in any case Events works fine here – http://cruxsketchpad2.com/events/. My next question is what to do from here, can someone access my site and take a closer look. Can we pay someone to remedy this? Can we narrow what needs to be done server side? Sorry lots of questions but we are running out of time.

[shawntarlo]

Hi Barry, any updates?

[shawntarlo]

So it seems i just have to unfortunately guess as to if a hosting platform will work or not?

[Barry]

Hi!

I appreciate you are up against a deadline here, but we can’t guarantee being able to respond any more quickly than once every 24hrs during the working week, I’m afraid.

Thanks for posting a link to the phpinfo() dump. It looks like both cURL and appropriate streams are enabled and ready to go, so there’s no issue there, but that could simply mean something at a different level is holding things up and the problem is still an environmental one:

But in any case Events works fine here – http://cruxsketchpad2.com/events/. My next question is what to do from here, can someone access my site and take a closer look …

So it seems i just have to unfortunately guess as to if a hosting platform will work or not?

Well, if the above site – where there is no problem – is on a different platform that certainly suggests he problem is restricted to Cloud Sites, or at least your particular installation within that service. You can let me know if that’s wrong or I’m misunderstanding. However, that being the case I could only really suggest you persist with their technical support, consider if Google Maps integration is vital or not (if it’s not, you might consider deactivating map view as an alternative) and/or consider migrating to a platform where there is no problem, such as wherever the above test site is hosted.

I’m sorry we can’t do more, but this doesn’t seem to be a widespread problem by any means and also seems tightly bound to your hosting service.

[Barry]

I’ll go ahead and close this thread out.

[Author]

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