I'll start from the beginning. I'm building a wordpress plugin that does double duty, in that it can be inserted in to a post via a shortcode, or added as a sidebar widget. All it does is output some js to make jquery.post requests to a local php file. The local php file makes a request to a webservice for some data. (I had to do it this way instead of directly querying the web service with jquery.ajax because the url contains a license key that would be public if put in the js).

Anyway, When I am viewing a page in the wordpress blog that has both the sidebar widget and the plugin output via shortcode only one of the requests work. I mean it works in that it gets a response back from the php script. Once the page is loaded they both work normally when manually told to.

Webpage view -> send 2 post requests to my php script -> both elements should be filed in, but only one is.

My php script is just:

<?php
    if(isset($_POST["zip"])) {
         // build a curl object, execute the request, 
         // and basically just echo what the curl request returns.
    }
?>

Pretty basic.

here is some js some people wanted to see:

function widget_getActivities( zip ){
    jQuery("#widget_active_list").text("");
    jQuery.post("http://localhost/wordpress/wp-content/ActiveAjax.php", { zip: zip}, 
		function(text) {
			jQuery(text).find("asset").each(function(j, aval){
				var html = "";
				html += "<a href='" + jQuery(aval).find("trackback").text() + "' target='new'> " +  jQuery(aval).find("assetName").text() + "</a><b> at </b>";

				jQuery("location", aval).each(function(i, val){
					html += jQuery("locationName", val).text() + " <b> on </b>";
				});

				jQuery("date", aval).each(function(){
					html += jQuery("startDate", aval).text();
				<!--jQuery("#widget_active_list").append("<div id='ActivityEntry'>" + html + " </div>");-->
				jQuery("#widget_active_list")
					.append(jQuery("<div>")
						.addClass("widget_ActivityEntry")
						.html(html)
						.bind("mouseenter", function(){
							jQuery(this).animate({ fontSize: "20px", lineHeight: "1.2em" }, 50);  
						})
						.bind("mouseleave", function(){
							jQuery(this).animate({ fontSize: "10px", lineHeight: "1.2em" }, 50);  
					})
					);

				});
			});
		});
}

Now imagine there is another function identical to this one except everything that is prepended with 'widget_' isn't prepended. These two functions get called separately via:

jQuery(document).ready(function(){
    w_zip = jQuery("#widget_zip").val();
	widget_getActivities( w_zip );
	jQuery("#widget_updateZipLink").click(function() { //start function when any update link is clicked
		widget_c_zip = jQuery("#widget_zip").val();
		if (undefined == widget_c_zip || widget_c_zip == "" || widget_c_zip.length != 5)
			jQuery("#widget_zipError").text("Bad zip code");
		else
			widget_getActivities( widget_c_zip );

	});
})

I can see in my apache logs that both requests are being made. I'm guessing it is some sort of race condition but that doesn't make ANY sense. I'm new to all this, any ideas?

EDIT: I've come up with a sub-optimal solution. I have my widget detect if the plugin is also being used on the page, and if so it waits for 3 seconds before performing the request. But I have a feeling this same thing is going to happen if multiple clients perform a page request at the same time that triggers one of the requests to my php script, because I believe the problem is in the php script, which is scary.