Popup On Cookie Settings Not working on cached sites

Hey @lejager, I really was able to reproduce the issue. It is strange, as soon as cookie is actually set, but it is overwritten each time I update the page. If you use Rules to display a popup, it can be a possible reason why cookie is not checked. In that case you need to add one more rule (condition) to check the cookie.

Hey guys!

OK, so...for the sake of Dmitry who may not have ever read these docs. :)

http://help.getpantheon.com/comment/1348#comment-1348
http://helpdesk.getpantheon.com/customer/portal/articles/425726-varnish-...
http://helpdesk.getpantheon.com/customer/portal/articles/425726#advanced...

Because of the way Pantheon is architected, with high scalability and availability in mind, the caching is very, very aggressive. The second article details how to make cookies with with the Varnish server caching.

Thanks! Have a good one!
- Erik

Erik,

Thank you for the reply, I really haven't ever suspected some hostings are designed to filter out all cookies except of Drupal native ones.

cool module, thanks :)

as i read the coocie is for days, i need for seconds. i have a news site and i want it to display an advertisment every 5 min when a user open an article.

can it be done ?

i try to put 0.001 on the cookie time

@tzin111, your comment is off-topic here.

@erik_pantheon, @lejager,

Modules should NOT make any suggestions about which hosting do you using, and what kind of cookie settings are required at particular hosting. Thus, reading any documentation on this topic is just inefficient for me. Please modify cookie name directly in the module if you want to; or open a feature request, where you ask to make cookie name editable. Thank you.

If you update the module, you should be able to specify popup cookie name via admin UI now.

I think you need to check if new cookie name corresponds to what @erik_pantheon told you. Please check Pantheon docs regarding this, and check whether cookie is set in your browser.

Well, cookie appears in the browser, but is it exposed also to PHP? You need to check $_COOKIE array in popup_onload_check_time_cookie() function.

I confirm that this module still has issues with the Popup cookie lifetime.

The cookie doesn't seem to be written for anonymous users. When I'm logged in as the admin, the cookie seems to be written out in the browser cache, but not if I'm surfing the site anonymously.

Another thing is when I'm logged in as the admin, and the cookie gets written (and remains in the cache), it's being ignored from the moment I log out.

Not sure if this makes sense or not, I'm only describing what I'm seeing, and that's the module only working properly for logged in users - or at least for the admin (user 1).

This goes for the current 1.1 version as well as the dev-version.

For people who need this functionality urgently, here's a quick manual solution:

1. Create the content of the popup in a file called popup.html (or .php if you like), and place it in your theme's folder
2. Temporarely disable the Popup On Load module (to avoid conflicts)
3. Download and enable the Colorbox module (and its library)
4. Download the jQuery Cookie library and put the files in a folder called jquery-cookie, placed in your theme's script-folder, e.g. sites/all/themes/mytheme/js/jquery-cookie <- This step is probably not needed anymore since this script comes with the Drupal core nowadays.
5. Open your theme's info-file and add the following line to the scripts:
   scripts[] = js/jquery-cookie/jquery.cookie.js
6. Open (or create) the html.tpl.php file in your theme's folder, and paste this code below the <?php print $scripts; ?> line:
   

   <script type="text/javascript">
   
       function loadMsg(){
   
           jQuery.noConflict();
           jQuery(document).ready(function(){
               if (!jQuery.cookie('popupcookie')) {
                   jQuery.colorbox({href:"/sites/all/themes/mytheme/popup.html", width: 640, height: 460});
                   jQuery.cookie('popupcookie', '1', { expires: 1}); }
           })}
   
   </script>

   Notice the dimensions of the popup, depending on the width and height of your popup.html's content. Also notice the expiration time, which is set to 1 day in this example (expires: 1). For more specific expiration times (hours, minutes, ...) you'll find enough reference on the web. Also adjust the location of the popup.html file (theme folder).

7. Paste the onload="loadMsg() attribute in your body-tag, so it looks like this:
   <body onload="loadMsg()" class="<?php print $classes; ?>" <?php print $attributes;?>>
   If you want the pop up only to display on the homepage, make your body tag look like this:
   <body<?php if(drupal_is_front_page()) : ?> onload="loadMsg()"<?php endif; ?> class="<?php print $classes; ?>" <?php print $attributes;?>>
8. Clear the Drupal cache and your browser's cache, and you should have it going.

Confirm the problem. This module is not compatible with Drupal cache. When I enable caching, it will display pop-up over and over again. Checking and making cookies should be done on client side (JS) and not server side (PHP).

Maybe I'll make a patch, if I figuring out how to solve it properly.

I made a patch. It's working for me now with Drupal page cache. Please test and comment.

@egontinno I tried your patch quickly but it has a requirement of a jquery cookie plugin, right?

@hanoii Yes, it's built in to jQuery < 1.9. If you use newer jQuery, you can download it and add it by yourself.

This seems to be working great for the standard implementation. However, if you use the Rules option the popup never fires.

Any thoughts?

@egontinno I see, I just found out that jquery.cookie is shipped with drupal core and also handled by jquery_update, so it can be added by the module.

Attached is an improved patch, based considerably on yours, with the following additions:

- Proper format, patch needs to be against the module git to make it easier to be applied
- Code removed instead of commenting the unnecessary functions around cookie server
- Make sure both jquery.cookie and jquery.once (both used by the js of the module) are loaded.
- Small function change with a new optional $settings argument, used by a change in rules.
- Improved the rules functionality (and rules default) to support this change: basically, as the cookie validation is happening on the client side, I removed the cookie condition for rules, and instead, I added the cookie name and cookie lifetime as a setting to the popup action. So right now, you can still do any server-side validation with rules, but delegate on the client what to do with the cookie.

@Poieo, could you please try the rules functionality?

Very small fix, as jquery.once is always registered by drupal, so remove that line from this module.

I don't think this fixed the issue with rules. I have the cookie set to display every hour, but it only shows up once the first time you visit the site. If I disable rules and just go with default implementation, it works great.

If there is anything I can do to help troubleshoot, let me know.

@Poieo have you changed the cookie lifetime value in the rules action? can you add a screenshot of the rules action configuration screen?

Ah. I didn't see that the rules configuration had changed. I updated the rules with the appropriate cookie names and values. I'll post back with an update.

It looks like we lost the "cookie is not set" condition. Was that intentional? That condition is useful to avoid showing the popup on the first visit. In other words, if you only want the popup to show after cookie time has past, not initially.

@Poieo, yes, I removed the cookie condition, because having a cookie condition server side is never going to work for cached pages, so that has to happen client side. I never thought of such an use case, I guess you could add that setting to the action rules alongside the other options, something like: cookie_lifetime_count or something like that in which you can add a count delay or something, but I believe it's getting just too specific. I'd love to hear some feedback from the maintainer to see if he accepts this new approach and then see what features can be added on top of it.

Ah. That makes sense. An initial offset as a variable in the actions settings would be the best way to implement that.

Your patch is a big improvement as it allows a cookie duration on a per rule basis. It is working well.

@Poieo, ok, as I said, let's push for this approach to be considered, then new features can be requested, if it's working for you, you might set it up as RTBC?

I didn't dig in far enough to see if you compensated for the default rule added by the module that checks if a cookie is set? That rule is what triggered the popup on the initial page load whether you were using the rules feature or not.

Did you add alternate functionality that provides for the initial popup? If so, then I will mark this RTBC.

@Poieo I attempted to do it, but it would be great if you can test, so that we are sure it works.

This fixed my problem with popup_onload (not using rules) and varnish as frontend cache. So I recommend this highly as RTBC.

I had the same problem. Applying patch #24 worked. It is not committed to 7.x-1.3 nor in 7.x-1.x-dev.

Also, the patch didn't apply, so I updated it.

#38 is working for me on a Pantheon site with cache enabled. Can be applied for 7.x-1.3.

We are using #38 as well and it is working. Should be re-opened and reviewed

@joco_sp thank you for the patch. #38 fixed the issue with my site.