Can't upload and install a PHP plugin

arjayarana · 2022-06-27 10:38:06

Hi all. New Textpattern user here.

I can’t install a PHP plugin (.zip). Every time I upload the file, I get this error: “Badly formed or empty plugin code.”

I checked the installation, and the plugin is extracted in the textpattern/plugins directory. Importing from disk gives the same error.

I’ve tried four plugins so far, and all gave this error. Installing a TXT plugin works fine, but not all plugins have TXT versions.

I’m using Apache 2.4, PHP 7.4, and MariaDB 10.6.

etc · 2022-06-27 14:27:09

Hi, welcome to txp.

Where have you downloaded plugins from? The ‘official’ repository is in a beta state yet, and some zip versions are not converted to txp format. You’d need to use Composer to install them, sorry for the site docs being ambiguous.

If you tell us what plugins you need, someone could provide a link to txp-compiled versions. Quite often, txp core itself is capable to replace their functionality.

arjayarana · 2022-06-27 22:23:36

I’m only making a blog, and so I don’t need many plugins. I’ve only downloaded from the repository at plugins.textpattern.com. I’ve come across textpattern.org, but I’m assuming that the plugins there are already outdated.

I’m still relatively new to self-hosting, and I don’t know yet how to use Composer.

So far I’ve installed the text versions of rah_sitemap_v2.1.0 and jcr_email_encode-0.3. What I’m trying to install is rah_comment_spam.

I also need a full-page caching plugin, like Cachify in WordPress. But I’m guessing there is no such plugin, and that’s fine with me. The TXP core is already very fast, and I don’t think my blog would become so popular that it would overwhelm my web host :)

uli · 2022-06-27 23:52:47

arjayarana wrote #333639:

What I’m trying to install is rah_comment_spam.

jakob kindly posted a .txt-version of rah_comment_spam v0.9 here.

arjayarana · 2022-06-28 00:35:47

Thanks! I’ve now installed both the maintenance and comment-spam plugins.

phiw13 · 2022-06-28 08:23:57

Fwiw, Gocom has recentishly updated many or most of his plugins – and included a .txt version in the release. Those are available from his github repo here.

etc · 2022-06-28 09:09:32

arjayarana wrote #333639:

I also need a full-page caching plugin, like Cachify in WordPress.

You can take a look at etc_cache. It is certainly not as fully-featured and easy to configure as Cachify, but does well its job, serving both cached code chunks from db and full static pages from disk, totally bypassing php/txp processing in this case. With automatic updates, whitelisting and so on.

arjayarana · 2022-06-28 13:47:18

etc wrote #333644:

You can take a look at etc_cache. It is certainly not as fully-featured and easy to configure as Cachify, but does well its job, serving both cached code chunks from db and full static pages from disk, totally bypassing php/txp processing in this case. With automatic updates, whitelisting and so on.

I’ve installed and tested the older etc_cache from the plugin directory, and I think I didn’t need cached code chunks, and so I uninstalled it.

But I will give this new experimental version a try, the one with full-page caching :)

Anyway, the main reason why I want caching is not because of speed, but because I want to save on processing resources. My web host is prepaid and charge in terms of resources used. Caching will become essential once I start getting more traffic.

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#1 2022-06-27 10:38:06