Search not working with google autocomplete

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Sometimes the search does not appear to be working correctly particularly when using place names auto-filled but the google locations functionality.  The problem is usually to do with the google api key you are using having been restricted to your website domain.  Because the plugin performs a background google maps api longitude/latitude lookup on address entered in the search box this restriction will prevent this lookup from completing.  This is because background requests will present the domain of the hosting company of your website, not your website address and therefore get block.

Resolution

Remove any domain restrictions on your google maps api key.  Visit https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/get-api-key and click the link to got to the Goolge API Console

No properties – Plugin reporting “For some reason the WP Property Feed plugin cannot make background connections to other servers.”

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In order to communicate with the various feed APIs the plugin requires certain php functions to be enabled, some of which are disabled by default by some hosting providers.  Our plugin requires both curl and fopen to be enabled and if either is not this message will appear.

Resolution

Contact your hosting provider and request that both the curl and fopen functions be enabled on your account.

No Properties – schedules failing

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The plugin uses WordPress cron (wp-cron) to schedule the updating of the properties from the various feeds and sometimes this can be disabled by your hosting provider.   If you are unsure if this is the case we recommend instally the wordpress plugin WP-Crontrol which will give useful information about the status of wp-cron.

Resolution

Ask your hosting provider to enable WordPress cron (wp-cron) for your site.  If that is not possible you will need to manually trigger the updates or use an online service like https://cron-job.org/en/ to ping http://www.yoursitedomain.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron to trigger the schedule automatically.

Missing Properties in search results – Sold and Let properties

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By default the plugin will not display Sold or Let properties in search results.  If you require these to be displayed in your results then add the following filter to your theme functions.php file

function my_soldlet_view( $example ) {
    return 'show';
}
add_filter('wppf_query_wppf_soldlet', 'my_soldlet_view');

Missing Properties – properties are on my backend software but not on my website

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There could be a number of reasons why properties are not appearing on your website.  Please check the following;

  1. Have you got the appropriate flags set in your back office software to send the missing properties to the website feed.  Note this may be a different flag to your portal (Rightmove, Zoopla, etc) flag.
  2. Have you got the “store images locally” flag set in the plugin settings, if yes then untick this flag and run a force refresh.  If you have alot of properties the server could be timing out whilst downloading all the images.
  3. If all fails contact us and we will happily have a look and find out what is happening, we are confident we can get you going

Expired plugin

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If you have been trialing the plugin and run out of time and your plugin has expired please just contact us and we will issue you a new trial key.

Properties stopped updating: Troubleshooting WordPress Cron

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If you have a site where the properties were updating from your feeds that suddenly stops working the problem is most likely to do with plugin or theme causing the WordPress scheduler to stall. Unfortunately any plugin has a schedule running that goes into error it will stop all the other schedules from running also. This might be as a result of adding a new plugin or an errant plugin update and can unfortunately be very hard to pinpoint. The first you you should do is make sure that all plugins are up to date as getting the latest versions may well fix any errors that were present in the plugins. If that fails the official advise from WordPress is to disabled plugins until the schedules start to run again which is not all that helpful on a live site!!

We suggest that you install a WordPress plugin called Crontrol (just go to wp-admin > plugins and search and add it in from there). This plugin will show you a list of Cron Events where you can see all the schedules that are due to run, when they last ran and when they are new due. If you have a long list of schedules due to run “now” then you more than likely have an errant schedule in the list. The most likely culprit is the one that is at the top of the list! The schedule name will normally reveal which plugin it belongs to so disable that plugin and then give the scheduler 5 mins to run and see if the schedules are now running. You can trigger the schedule straight away by going to http://www.yoursitedomain.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron if you can’t wait (this doesn’t always work because WordPress puts a time limit on the use of this direct url). Once you see that the cron events are working again you will know what was preventing it and can let the plugin developer know.

Changing the WP Property feed property slug

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In some cases you might be using our plugin along side other plugins or themes that already use the slug /property/ for another Custom Post Type.  If that is the case you will see a clash and the display of either our properties of the existing custom post type may become garbled.  To change the default slug for our plugin use the following code snippet and place it in you theme’s functions.php file.

add_filter(‘wppf_filter_slug’,’my_property_slug’);
function my_property_slug($current) {
return ‘wppf_property’;
}

Change ‘wppf_property’ to whatever

Once this has been added to your function.php we recommend that you log into wp-admin and visit Settings > Permalinks and click the update button on this page.  This will refresh the WordPress permalink cache and make sure that the correct templates are then applied.

Resourcing Issues: Timeouts meaning property updates do not complete

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Sadly it is the case that may WordPress hosting companies offer cheap hosting by putting hundreds of sites on shared servers and seriously under-resourcing memory and processor power as a result.  This is particularly an issue where we are performing complex tasks like processing property feeds which often involves large numbers of properties.  You may see behaviour where some of your properties are being updated but not all of them and in the feed processing tab you seen erratic or no entries in your processing log.  You can test this by clicking the “Force Refresh” tick box and updating the feed as this will force the feed to update there and then.  If you then see the page waiting to reload for several minutes and then fails finally fails with an error message, this is a sure sign that the server is under-resourced.  The error is simply saying that the process of updating the feed took too long so I gave up!  In this case ask your hosting provider what options are available to you to get more resources applied to the site.

We test all our feeds on a pretty lightweight AWS (Amazon Web Services) instance for performance and constantly tune our code to be as efficient as possible.  For instance, most feed types now use virtual media assets in the WordPress asset library so that we don’t have to download of process property images.  Processing a feed of around 100 properties should take no more than 30 seconds to 1 minute with a moderately resourced server.  Even this is longer than we would like but unfortunately to do things the proper WordPress way we have to adhere to the data-structures that WordPress uses and these are not well designed for processing large amounts of data (it was designed as a blog platform so we can’t blame them for that!)

Unfortunately the saying “you get what you pay for” absolutely applies to WordPress hosting and unfortunately sometimes the only solution is to pay for a better service.

The wp_posts and wp_postmeta database tables on my site are huge

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We would expect on any site for our plugin to produce more pages and meta data entries than any other type of content since you have say around 100 properties this is equivalent tp one “wp_post” entry for each property and each property has it’s property data stored in “wp_postmeta” which includes around 20 entries for each property post (address details, pricing, features etc are all post meta).  Then finally we have property images which are also stored in the wp_posts table and each property might have many images (we generally go on a multiple of 10 per property, so for 100 properties expect around 1000 media entries).  We use all the standard data structures in WordPress because this means our plugin is compatible with other WordPress plugins and Themes.  It would be much more efficient to build our own data structures but then all the property data would sit outside of WordPress and be very hard to work with.

If even given these figures the sizes of the database tables seem excessively large it may be that removal of old properties or property images is not happening as it should.  We use the force delete options when removing expired property posts (and their images) from WordPress which “should” remove all traces of the property and related postmeta and images (if they are only connected to the property*).  WordPress doesn’t automatically remove images that are related for posts as it assumes they may be used in other posts but we do use a force remove option on related images to overcome this.  Sometimes, other plugin prevent this from happening or WordPress just simply ignores the force delete option, in which case you could end up with a growing database tables.  Unfortunately, we have no control over this but there are a couple of things you can try.

First, there are many plugins around that will look for orphaned images/media (images that are not attached to any posts) and will remove those images.  We would suggest that you add one to your site and run it to remove any orphaned property images.  This in itself may resolve your database size issues.

Secondly if that doesn’t help, you can go into wp-admin > Settings > WP Property Feed > Debug tab and click the “Purge all property data” button.  This will attempt to force remove all the existing property data (including images) from the database.  Obviously if you do do this it’s best to attempt at a time when the site is quiet as it will remove all current listings, and once complete you would need to run a force refresh on your property feed to reload the listings.

ADDITIONAL INFO:

If you see a 504, 404 page when trying to use the purge property function it is likely it has timed out.  If you just go back and re-submit the purge again and again you should find that the properties eventually all properties get removed.  Whilst doing this it is a good idea to suspend the property feed update – just temporarily remove the feed credentials to do that.  What you can also do it open two browser windows, one with the currently list of properties in wp-admin and the other on the purge properties page.  When you click the purge button go back to the other window and refresh again and again and you should see the list of properties reducing in size (that way you can have some confidence that the process is happening) at the same time you can do the same with the media library and you should see this reducing in size also as property images are removed.

Media Cleaner Plugin

We recommend installing the plugin “Media Cleaner” to check your media files are only the ones you should be keeping.  Media cleaner has a setting in the “Extra Rules” for “Attached Images” which you should tick as property images are attached to their related property but do not appear in the main content section so will appear as “no longer in use” if this box is not ticked.  Run a scan and remove any unused images.  Just be careful and follow the instructions (take note of backups and page builders if you are using Elementor or similar as you will need the pro version for that).