A plugin's files arrive with it

A course does not consist only of pages. It also carries the videos, posters and images those pages point at, and installing it is supposed to bring all of it.

For most plugins it did. For one particular shape it did not: a plugin whose front page is built by code the plugin itself ships — a shop front, a catalog, a course landing view. Installing one of those could sit for a full minute doing nothing visible, finish reporting success, and leave every one of its files behind. The pages were there. The videos 404'd. The only sign anything had gone wrong was a line in the log.

The two halves of the plugin were fighting each other. A plugin's code is rebuilt on your portal when it arrives, and while that rebuild is running the plugin's front page has no code to serve it yet. Publishing the files happens through that same front page — it is where the portal keeps a node's files — so the publish arrived while the page was still waiting for the rebuild. It waited with it. And if the rebuild finished without producing anything usable, because the plugin's code no longer compiles against this version of the platform, the page waited for a result that was never coming, forever. The file publish eventually gave up on its own clock, a minute later, and dropped what it was carrying.

Two things changed. The publish now waits for the plugin's code to be ready before it goes through the front page, so on a healthy install it simply happens in the right order. And a page that is waiting on code which turns out never to arrive now stops waiting and says so, instead of hanging silently — so it opens with an explanation of what is wrong with the plugin, and the files are published either way.

If you have ever installed a course and found its videos missing, that is the bug. Re-installing it now publishes them.