Ajax success message returns HTML of my homepage

Question

Using ajax and wordpress (trying to do it properly). It is rather new to me but I had this working before with more flair. Seemingly-randomly started having issues so I broke my code down to the most basic level, and I can't even get that to work!!! I feel like i'm just getting frustrated and it's forcing me to miss a simple mistake. Is there anything wrong with this?

My jQuery:

$.post(
    ajaxurl, // http://localhost/mysite/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
    {action: "post-save"},
    function(response){
      alert(response);
    }
);

My PHP:

function update_post(){
    echo json_encode(array("success" => "all systems go"), JSON_FORCE_OBJECT ); 
    exit;
}
add_action( 'wp_ajax_post-save', 'update_post' );

The end result is the alert works, which means $.post is successful (right?), but the returned variable response is the html source of my homepage...

Answer 1

I figured it out...

This might help some newbie like myself who makes the same mistake so I'll answer my own question :)

Turns out I wasn't logged in, go figure. The response was strange though and helped to throw me off, returning the entire homepage. The reason for this is I had blocked my functions files which includes the Ajax responder like so:

function block_users()
{
    if( !current_user_can( 'delete_pages' ) ) {  
        wp_redirect( get_home_url(), 301 );
        exit;
    }
}
add_action('admin_init','block_users');

I should have known to log in (thought I was) but, such unexpected results and it was friday :)

Also note to anyone who stumbles onto this: if you do want someone to do ajax without being logged in use the no-priviledge version of wp_ajax, wp_ajax_nopriv.

add_action( 'wp_ajax_nopriv_action', 'function' );

In lieu of

add_action( 'wp_ajax_action', 'function' );

The former does not require permission, ie being logged in, to do ajax requests.