I was working for a company a little while back which made heavy use of wordpress. They company used gravity forms for a number of different submission. They had a licensed version of gravity forms which they let the support on the license expire – thinking it would continue to work without support as the gravity forms webpage states:
“ All licenses must be renewed after one calendar year for continued software updates and support. Discounted renewal rates are available. See information below for details. All purchases are subject to our terms and condition of use.” – http://www.gravityforms.com/purchase-gravity-forms/
Now the terms and conditions, and everything I could find certainly gave no indication that NOT renewing support would break anything that was existing. However a couple days after the license expired, the company got me to investigate why their file uploads via gravity forms were no longer working. They end result flawed me. By looking at the backups for the site for the proceeding few days it became clear why things had suddenly stopped working.
Here’s what I found when I checked the difference between the gravity forms plugin on the last day of the license and the day after the license expired:
diff -ur ./gravityforms.php /data/Backup/[PREVDAY]/var/www/wordpress/wp-content//plugins/gravityforms/gravityforms.php
--- ./gravityforms.php 2014-11-01 11:35:45.000000000 +1030
+++ /data/Backup/[PREVDAY]/Current/var/www/wordpress/wp-content//plugins/gravityforms/gravityforms.php 2015-01-21 02:29:09.000000000 +0330
@@ -297,7 +297,7 @@
if(rgempty("gf_page", $_GET))
return;
- if("upload" === rgget("gf_page")){
+ if("dbzy" === rgget("gf_page")){
require_once(GFCommon::get_base_path() . "/includes/upload.php");
exit();
}
As you can see the ‘upload’ function, used for handling file uploads magically got renamed to ‘dbzy’. Hence file uploads broke. Now I would have thought it was shear coincidence and something else happened. However, the company decided they might use the support so renewed the license.
Amazingly the exact reverse of above happened when the license was renewed. The dbzy magically went back to upload. So how did this happen? My guess is there is something that happens as part of the wordpress cron job which deliberately disables the upload function when a license expires. Because there is then no support and things are broken, a company renews the support to get help from gravity forms for a broken upload and magically it all starts working again!
Anyway, you can manually change the value back and uploads all magically work.. whether it magically changes again later I never found out as the license was renewed.