CUNY Academic Commons

Came upon this by accident when I was looking at future release issues! Boone I just wanted to see if you meant to hold off on assigning this to me or if I should start looking into it. I've also noticed that it's really slow.

This looks like a promising and lightweight library. I think it works by offloading routines to wp_remote_post() calls: https://github.com/A5hleyRich/wp-background-processing

Is wp_remote_post() really non-blocking?

So the problem I'm running into here is the need to pass the ID of the newly generated post back to the main thread, after processing in the background. It doesn't look like there's an easy way to do it, and I think it'd defeat the purpose of doing it in a non-blocking way anyway.

One thing that might be easier and might still make a difference could be to just do the email-sending in a background process. I think that that takes a long time, and doing it in the background might really make a difference. Should I give that a try?

Sending emails in batches is going to run into the same problem as posting forum topics in batches: you need to store a bunch of data to be run in separate processes.

Ray has done a bunch of thinking about this with respect to the BuddyPress Group Email Subscription plugin. Maybe he can weigh in with some thoughts?

So the problem I'm running into here is the need to pass the ID of the newly generated post back to the main thread, after processing in the background. It doesn't look like there's an easy way to do it, and I think it'd defeat the purpose of doing it in a non-blocking way anyway.

Dan, do you have any example code somewhere?

I would stick with TechCrunch's WP_Async_Task library:
https://github.com/techcrunch/wp-async-task

TechCrunch's library is easier to understand and quite simple to set up once you understand their approach.

What you would do is extend the WP_Async_Task class and tailor it to the 'bbp_new_topic_post_extras' action because that is the hook you're using to do the multiple post email sending (bpmfp_create_duplicate_topics()). WP_Async_Task::prepare_data() is where you would pass the topic ID from the 'bbp_new_topic_post_extras' hook.

Hopefully that is enough to go on.

For more examples, see how I'm using WP_Async_Task in the experimental Group Email Subscription branch:
https://github.com/boonebgorges/buddypress-group-email-subscription/commit/4acc09d0b16279333a39652f176960c96f61a61e

Or in this BuddyPress proposal to offload sending at-mentions:
https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/attachment/ticket/6930/6930.wp-async-task-example.patch

I took a quick look at A5hleyRich's WP_Background_Process class and there's a bit more manual work to do for set up. However, he does have a queue system in place, but his queue system uses the database, which can be slow.

Thank you Ray! I like the TechCrunch library.

I've been messing around with it for a little while, but I'm still having trouble. It seems like my create_duplicate_topics() function just isn't running. Here's what I've got:

class BPMFP_Async_Topic_Create extends WP_Async_Task {
    protected $action = 'bbp_new_topic_post_extras';

    protected function prepare_data( $data ) {
        $topic_id = $data[0];
        return( array( 'topic_id' => $topic_id ) );
    }

    protected function run_action() {
        $topic_id = $_POST['topic_id'];

        do_action( 'wp_async_' . $this->action, $topic_id );
    }
}

And then, in a functions file included on init at priority 10 I've got:

function bpmfp_register_async_actions() {
    if( false === class_exists( 'WP_Async_Task' ) ) {
        require( plugin_dir_path( __FILE__ ) . '/wp-async-task.php' );
    }
    if ( false === class_exists( 'BPMFP_Async_Topic_Create' ) ) {
        require( plugin_dir_path( __FILE__ ) . '/class-bpmfp-async-topic-create.php' );
    }

    $bpmfp_async_topic_create = new BPMFP_Async_Topic_Create;
}
add_action( 'init', 'bpmfp_register_async_actions', 15 );

And I changed the action hook for my create_duplicate_topics function from bbp_new_topic_post_extras to wp_async_bbp_new_topic_post_extras.

I've tried to do some debugging, but I'm getting some confusing results. For one thing, when I add some debug messages to the library's launch_on_shutdown() function, which is supposed to run on the 'shutdown' hook, they're getting printed out during the 'launch' function, which is hooked to 'bbp_new_topic_post_extras' and is what adds launch_on_shutdown() to 'shutdown', so I'm not sure what's up there.

Thanks for your help!

It looks like you're partially on your way there, Dan!

Now that the bpmfp_create_duplicate_topics() function is run asynchronously, you should move any nonce checks to the BPMFP_Async_Topic_Create::prepare_data() class method.

Also since bpmfp_create_duplicate_topics() relies on a few POST variables, you should return these variables in your BPMFP_Async_Topic_Create::prepare_data() class method in the array where you are also returning the topic ID.

POST variables like 'groups-to-post-to', 'bbp_topic_tags', 'bbp_topic_content', and 'bbp_topic_title' should be returned since they are referenced in the bpmfp_create_duplicate_topics() function.

Let me know if that helps get your code running.

Huge help, Ray - thank you!

Here's how I've got it working on my local install: https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/bp-multiple-forum-post/commit/1ad4fe04cf66d4ebd198a513937f07dc4f84ffda

And here's my attempt to clean the code up some by splitting into a few different files, and add documentation: https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/bp-multiple-forum-post/commit/47f7535f909881be1826315cc0937b6754f5dc1c

Let me know if this looks okay!

Sorry for the delay on this, Dan!

I took a look at the BPMFP code and made some commits to address a few things, namely fatal errors and an issue where the post content was empty in the email when no groups were selected.

Lastly, I needed to add a hook so plugins can do something when BPMFP has deemed that it is okay to send the email. I needed this hook so I could add some code to Reply By Email so BPMFP emails will work with RBE.

I did come across a UX issue, but this isn't really related to this issue. Let's say I'm a member of two groups and I'm subscribed to "All Email" for both groups. Now, I decide to make a multiple forum topic to both of these groups. If members of both groups reply by email to this topic, the discussion will be forked and it will be hard to keep track of which conversation belongs to which group, especially when replying by email. I thought I'd mention this to get some UX feedback.

Those all look great - thank you Ray!

So the issue for this ticket is addressed in the plugin now: https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/bp-multiple-forum-post

But the UX issue that Ray raised does seem like it ought to be addressed. Sam do you have any thoughts?

Sorry, I hadn't realized that Paige is now in the UX role! Paige - what do you think about the issue that Ray raised above?