On Tuesday, August 1, 2023, we released Matador Jobs 3.8.11 to all our users. This release contains a bugfix that improves how Matador Jobs works with object caching systems, especially the Redis Object Caching system.
A No-Name Transient Bug
PHP is a stateless programming language, which means it does not remember data from one load to another. Since WordPress is built with PHP, each time WordPress loads a new page, it would load a copy of itself that has forgotten data from its previous load, but we programmers pass state between each WordPress load using HTML form data, query strings, cookies, and most importantly, the database.
When data is temporary in nature, but also necessary to store in the database, we use “transients”. These data are given a name like “matador_temporary_information” and each time WordPress loads it reads transients and “remembers” that information. WordPress provides a robust system to create and use this transient data, and a part of that system, we learned, is a little less robust than we expected, as it does not have a safeguard in place for when a developer (ie: us) make a mistake that fails to properly name that transient. And that is what we did.
When this happened, we actually didn’t break WordPress. WordPress somehow works just fine with a no-name transient. However, to make WordPress more efficient at scale, web hosts use persistent object caching systems, including Redis. Redis, and other persistent object caches, bypass the database for transients, saving this temporary data in a persistent memory shared between loads of WordPress. This makes WordPress much faster, especially when developers leverage Transients and other caching in their plugins, as Matador does. That said, a no-name transient, which doesn’t break WordPress, does cause Redis to freak out, and that is the problem we discovered this week! Ooops!
This hotfix release does basically one thing… fixes a bug that results in a no-name transient. We also have written and submitted a patch to WordPress cores that adds safeguards to prevent this from happening for future WordPress developers, and that may come in a future release of WordPress.
Other/Misc
This patch also confirms that Matador Jobs Pro and Matador Jobs Lite is tested on versions of WordPress 6.3, due for release on August 8th, 2023.
Update Now!
Matador Jobs 3.8.11 is released for automatic* update to all subscribers as of Tuesday, August 1, 2023. If your subscription has expired, renew it on your account page. If you find any issues, please send a support request.
* Please Note: if your current installed version is 3.8.0 to 3.8.4, you need to manually install this update.
