Server timeouts and other errors when exporting

[harrism]

Every time I export a post of any length I get a server timeout error or an unknown error message. I end up with a draft post with the correct title but no content. I tested with 4 test documents.

1. A trivial doc with only one line and no images. This works fine, and takes about 10 seconds to export.
2. A trivial doc with only one line and one image. Still works, but takes about 30 seconds to export.
3. A real doc, with thousands of words and several images of various sizes. This one fails. All posts of substantial length with substantial number of images that I have tried fail.
4. A copy of the the same doc as (3), with all images removed. This failed the first time I clicked save, with the error "Error Your server returned an unexpected response. This could be a misconfiguration, a bad plugin, or something may be broken. Don't panic yet though!". I clicked save again immediately and it succeeded. Took about 20 seconds to export.

I am happy to provide you with access to all of these test docs, and possibly even to our site backend (temporarily) if it would help debug. But I prefer you contact me directly to discuss that. If that would help, let me know and I'll give you contact details.

[harrism]

BTW, the doc (3) that times out is about 8.7MB when I download it as an HTML archive from google docs. So it's not gigantic.

[harrism]

I will also add that the competitor to this plugin, a paid product called Wordable.io, uploads long docs with many images with no problem to our wordpress.org site. So I don't think it's our site. Wordable has a really nice progress bar that says things like "uploading image (2 / 10)" which gives you confidence that it is working. And then it just works. Note Wordable has the same problem with images not being resizable and not supporting [caption]. Like wordpress.com for Google Docs it also just inserts <img> tags.

[georgeh]

Hi! Sorry for the delay, I was on vacation. Thank you very much for your detailed report, and trying out different scenarios!

For your test doc 2 ("A trivial doc with only one line and one image. Still works, but takes about 30 seconds to export.") can you confirm that the second time you post it, it's closer to the timing on the first test doc? It should only upload the image once, and re-use the uploaded image on subsequent updates.

Also, we have had a number of requests for [caption] but have not seen support in Google Docs for captions. Would you mind sharing a document with captions with me at [email protected] so I can take a look?

I'm looking for ways to improve the image upload, but we are constrained by running the upload in Google Apps Script's hosted runtime (a requirement for add-ons)

[EmilLamprecht]

I'm new to this tool, but I'm experiencing something similar. If I create a test of a couple lines and a small image, it goes through without a hitch. However, we're usually posting articles of 2000-4000 with multiple images in it. I can't get any of those to go through. Often, it will push the post setup, title and settings through, but no content comes in on the WP side, just the titled post with an empty content field.

Would love to use this tool if we can be sure our normal size docs will work with it!

[harrism]

Hi George, if the performance of Google Apps Script is the problem, perhaps you should flip it around like Wordable.io did. They host a service where you log into their site, and then connect to your google drive account and your wordpress site. Then they show you a list of google docs, which you can then export to a wordpress site. It runs well, and provides a nice progress bar ("uploading image 3/10...").

Automattic could provide a service on Wordpress.com that would work similarly, and it might work better than a Google Docs add-on. Wordable.io is a paid service which I'm about to pay for (but I will still try out new versions of your add-on to see if it improves! I would pay for a similar service from Automattic if it worked better.)

Regarding your question on my test doc: How do I export a second time? I didn't think you could -- see #81.

Regarding captions: Really this is a discussion for Issue #84. No, Google Docs doesn't have captions. I usually put them in as regular text below the image and then insert them as actual captions when I edit the Wordpress post. Even generating empty [caption] tags in the export so that you get proper resizing options would be better than what you have now ( tag only). Currently you have to delete each image and re-add it to get resizing to work.