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Appointments+ won't even deactivate

I have been having issues with erratic behavior in Appointments+ (e.g., not respecting changes in break time, errors in the log file related to the gcal synching when I was troubleshooting what I thought was an Ultimate Branding issue). In trying to configure Membership2 Pro, I decided to just deactivate Appointments+ for now and deal with it later, to make sure there weren’t any underlying conflicts. Now Appointments+ won’t even deactivate — the Plugins panel says “Plugin deactivated” when I click “Deactivate,” but clearly it is not.

It could just be a red herring, but I’m concerned maybe I’m having issues across multiple WPMUdev plug-ins because of my host’s caching. I’m on a managed DreamPress server with DreamHost, and they use Varnish. I’ve clicked “Purge Varnish,” with no notable effect on this issue. I was considering going in with ssh to manually purge varnish and clear memcache, but I don’t know if that’s a logical or pointless next step.

I already opened support access when I filed a previous ticket, and that’s still in affect, as the issue is unresolved. I’m not sure if all of this is related or not, but I would really appreciate it if someone could check it out and help me figure out how to proceed. We have an advertising campaign poised to launch, and all we’re waiting on at this point is getting Membership 2 Pro and Appointments+ configured and functioning reliably. As of now, the website has not officially launched and is not intended to be “live,” so it’s fine if you need to tinker.

Thanks!!

Tue, 5 Apr 2016 15:50:04
  • Jude
    • DEV MAN

    Hey Erica,

    I took a peek inside the site and see what you mean. Could you temporarily rename the Appts + folder to something else say _appointments and see if that lets you disable the plugin ?

    I too suspect it could be something to do with a Varnish config but not proficient enough with it to pinpoint exactly what

    Cheers

    Jude

  • Erica
    • Site Builder, Child of Zeus

    Hi Jude,

    Thanks for the quick reply.

    When I renamed the folder to _appointments and then went to the Plugins panel, it says “The plugin appointments/appointments.php has been deactivated due to an error: Plugin file does not exist” and Appointments+ now shows as deactivated.

    Let me know what you think I should do next — I do ultimately want to use both Appointments+ and Membership2 Pro, so even though I got Appointments+ deactivated, that doesn’t solve my larger problem.

    Thanks again,

    Erica

  • Erica
    • Site Builder, Child of Zeus

    Update: I just tried transferring a snapshot of my entire site to my old GoDaddy account that has not yet expired (weathertiger.org) and to my local server. Without delving too deeply, Appointments+ appears to be behaving as you would expect, at least without the problems I was having with it not respecting break times on DreamHost (weathertiger.com). This makes me think it’s my host, but I don’t know where that leaves me.

    Are the WPMUdev premium plug-ins not compatible with DreamHost? That would be very frustrating, considering a big reason I migrated to DreamHost was because of positive reviews on this site.

  • Erica
    • Site Builder, Child of Zeus

    That’s a relief, hopefully temporarily disabling caching either fixes things or gives us some clarity on what’s going on. I had already submitted a support ticket on DreamHost and just had a livechat asking them to disable Varnish — they said they were escalating my ticket and it should be disabled soon.

  • Erica
    • Site Builder, Child of Zeus

    OK! First, while waiting for DreamHost to respond, I did some more testing on my local server, and all of my problems disappeared. This, along with information from DreamHost support themselves, confirmed to me that Varnish was ultimately the issue.

    In case anyone finds this thread and wants more information about DreamHost/DreamPress…

    DreamHost support says there is no way to disable Varnish within their managed DreamPress service and suggested I “downgrade” to their VPS service (which was probably what I should’ve used in the first place, not sure why I let myself be “upsold” to DreamPress).

    Their support representative also said:

    If you are using MultiSite at all, we don’t outright block MultiSite from being used, but it’s not supported on DreamPress as it does not work well at all within this environment.

    Bottom line: Beware of DreamPress if you’re trying to use Appointments+, Membership 2 Pro, Ultimate Branding, etc. or MultiSite.