package playne

imports "programmer"

WordPress, WP E-Commerce and the lack of ASYNC AJAX

Now Normally the A in AJAX means Asynchronous, meaning you can have several requests going at once, so it was very confused as to why my AJAX wasn’t. My WordPress plugin is a long running import process and I decided to use AJAX so that I can provide timely feedback to the user as to how far the import had gotten.

But these status updates were not working. I would get the entire output at the end of the process.

Then it dawned on me. WP E-Commerce is a pig and assumes that you want a session started all the time (even if you do not need it – which is rather bad for varnish caching), and PHP sessions are blocking, so that only one call with the same session id is handled at a time. AJAX sends cookies, and therefore WP E-Commerce starts the same session for all session requests.

So remember, if you are writing a long running plugin with lots of AJAX requests and you are not getting async output, check to see if there is a session cookie being sent!

The way I solved this problem is to use this code at the top and bottom of your plugin!

if ($_COOKIE['PHPSESSID']) {
	session_write_close();
}

if ($_COOKIE['PHPSESSID']) {
	session_start();
}

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