CUNY Academic Commons

Agree with this in principle, but also think it will be a challenge to identify which warnings are "useless." Some of those pop-ups may contain useful information along with information that the viewer doesn't have ability to act upon.

If all those pop ups were contained within a div we could maybe collapse them by default, but they're not. Is there a relatively easy way to do this?

Since all or most of these warnings are useless to users since they can't upgrade plugins on their own,

It appears that most of the ones that fall into the "upgrade plugins" category are, in fact, only visible to users who have the 'install_plugins' capability. On the Commons, only you, I, Ray, and maybe one or two others will ever see these notices.

Each notice is placed independently by a plugin. There's no centralized place where I can hook in and selectively disable them. The only thing I could do would be to disable anything from showing a notice there, but that would also disable things like success/error messages when performing various actions in the Dashboard, so I don't think it's advisable. As such, the only way I can remove individual items is to research how the plugin chooses to add the item, and then taking whatever steps are necessary to prevent the plugin from doing so.

This can be done, but it's time-consuming and fragile - our overrides can be broken by a plugin update. So, if this is a priority, I'd suggest first logging in as a normal site admin; it's probably not a good use of our time to suppress notices visible only to site admins. Then, find the handful of worst offenders - the ugliest, most persistent, notices.

I've looked into this some, but I'm a little confused: it looks like 3 of those messages can be dismissed by the user, the Twitter one is a legitimate warning that the user should be able to do something about.

On the Viper Video Tags plugin: it looks like we should remove it, or install the replacement plugin. The author has discontinued it: http://www.viper007bond.com/2016/07/04/vipers-video-quicktags-wordpress-plugin-discontinued/

The EasyRotator one is a little weird, but I think it's basically legitimate, too. I imagine it goes away after the user clicks to install the application. If the user doesn't actually want to use the Twitter plugin or EasyRotator, can't they de-activate those plugins?

The notice at the bottom, while dismiss-able, does present an issue though. It looks like there's a few themes on the site that produce that kind of message, using this library: http://tgmpluginactivation.com/ Basically it lets the themes require or recommend a set of plugins. That's a genuine issue with the theme though, that users might want to know: that certain aspects of it won't work right because not all the plugins are installed. Maybe there's a way to make the message more clear? Or another solution?

Thanks for this initial research, Dan.

On the Viper Video Tags plugin: it looks like we should remove it, or install the replacement plugin. The author has discontinued it: http://www.viper007bond.com/2016/07/04/vipers-video-quicktags-wordpress-plugin-discontinued/

Yes. Let's remove it and install the replacement. It appears that the replacement maps the legacy shortcode names onto the new, native-to-WP shortcodes. If this is true, we should be able to get away with removing the plugin, installing the new plugin, and network-activating it. Dan, can you verify this? If it's correct, could you open a new ticket and take care of the codebase side of things? Then leave a note in https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/wiki/Release-ACTION_REQUIRED-list reminding me to network activate the new plugin on release.

The EasyRotator one is a little weird, but I think it's basically legitimate, too. I imagine it goes away after the user clicks to install the application. If the user doesn't actually want to use the Twitter plugin or EasyRotator, can't they de-activate those plugins?

You might be correct about all this, but it's not reasonable that the notice should appear on the main Dashboard page. Easy Rotator has its own top-level menu item. Can you unhook the default admin notice and re-add it, only when viewing the Easy Rotator panel? I think that's good enough for the purposes of this ticket.

The notice at the bottom, while dismiss-able, does present an issue though. It looks like there's a few themes on the site that produce that kind of message, using this library: http://tgmpluginactivation.com/ Basically it lets the themes require or recommend a set of plugins. That's a genuine issue with the theme though, that users might want to know: that certain aspects of it won't work right because not all the plugins are installed. Maybe there's a way to make the message more clear? Or another solution?

Let's do the same thing here. If the theme has its own admin panel, show the notice there only. If it doesn't, let's show it on Appearance and Plugins only. Can you have a look to see if this is possible?

Here's my first crack at hiding the EasyRotator admin notices except on its own admin pages: https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/commit/83f7eb111b698c9b99ccccad43ded5a9fa62e822

I'll take a look at the issue with the theme notices now, and then dig into testing the Viper plugin update/fix.

The themes all add their options pages in pretty inconsistent ways, so I don't think there's going to be a good way to tell automatically is the theme has it's own options page or not. I think the best option will be to just show it on Appearance and Plugins for all of them. The other option would be to go through all the themes that have the tgmpluginactivation library individually, see if they have their own admin pages and what they're called, and do the notice-moving on a case-by-case basis.

Sorry just realized those changes should be in mu-plugins and not the bp-nelo functions file! Moved it and will put the others here: https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/commit/95a331fba0e96e78e0bb3c6f51061bc31d5a7528

Sorry for all the spamming here, but I've hidden the TGMPA notices except on Appearance and Plugins screens: https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/commit/14941ff12f18c58783f5b444d10b51324813e26c

Excellent! Thanks for your work on this so far.

Viper's Video: Yes, it looks like it's just deleting the old plugin and replacing it with the Migrator version, and then leaving that enabled. It looks like it keeps the quicktags intact, although I can't guarantee that all the formatting stuff will still work exactly the same, especially if people were using the defaults, since they're different between Viper's plugin and the Wordpress native ones. Which release should I add it to for the ACTION_REQUIRED? 1.10? I pushed it to the 1.9.x branch: https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/commit/9272bc6f592590c1af98d05ecd9c0d56b23bb8a0

Last thing - should I handle the Twitter Mentions as Comments notice like we did with EasyRotator? Just making it show up on the plugin's settings page? My only hesitance there is that, because of the way the plugin works, people might not have any other way of knowing that it isn't working, and assume that it is and they just aren't getting any mentions.

Awesome. Thanks to you both for your work on this -- I think it will make significant improvements in usability