Tag: plugins

That is Odd

My “older posts| newer posts” navigation seems to be kaput.Needless to say perhaps I was too creative with a customized Loop or 2. I started my Shopping in Brooklyn (Brooklyn♥) and used a custom query to have only that category show on that page and not in my main blog post page or anywhere else and it seems I broke my WordPress a little. I don’t have the time right now to properly obsess over it to fix it.
What I’m up to right now:
I’m unusually busy getting a staging level website design together for Lee Lee’s Valise and finishing up 2 other projects for other clients (thankfully, they are being laidback about it). I just yesterday made live a site I’d been working on for weeks and weeks. I haven’t worked that hard on one site since I overhauled my dad’s.

I just used the wordtube plugin to try to set up a site that Lisa from Lee Lee’s valise might be able to use to webscast with…right now all I’ve got loaded are image files and I’m not so sure wordtube makes for a good slideshow display. It uses Jeroen ‘s W. media player. I bought 3 licenses around 2 years ago from him and don’t even use 2 of them on any live sites anymore! Anyway, obviously wordtube is much more suitable for playlists of swfs and flvs so it’s still on my list of good plugins to have.Also it’s very easy to use and I like that. I didn’t have to think too hard to set it up at all and it didn’t interfere with everything else or my design. You probably wouldn’t be all that amazed to hear that this is kind of rare.

Who am I kidding?
There was no way I could not just go run off and figure out how to fix my Loop! I’d read about this somewhere(probably many places) that using query_posts isn’t the best way to go about what I was trying to do.
This works : < ?php query_posts($query_string . "&cat=-230"); ? >
This doesn’t : < ?php query_posts('cat=-230');? >

Wp Auto Upgrade, not good for big plugins.

I am so glad that wp 2.5.1 has the ability to automatically upgrade plugins because it saves a lot of time and is very neat and tidy. Unfortunately, some of the bigger plugins like cforms or wp-shopping cart tend to mess up if auto-upgraded.

By bigger and big I mean complicated, multi folder/directory plugins with lots of data and whathaveyou.
With the WP-Shopping cart the auto upgrade ended up costing me a day’s labor.
I lost all my product page thumbnail images. How? I don’t know since the uploaded images for products aren’t in the Plugin folder but in the Uploads folder. Therefore they couldn’t have gotten over written. But the linkage to them was messed up.
Although, given the history of wonkiness this plugin has had this might have happened anyway even if I had uploaded the latest version manually…

Mainly, the largest problem for the auto upgrader is this plugin comes in an extra folder “wp-ecommerce”. The folder you want uploaded is “wp-shopping-cart”. WP’s plugin auto upgrader can’t read the readme.txt which of course says do not upload the wp-ecommerce folder, just the wp-shopping-cart folder. So after an auto upgrade the E-Commerce tab in your admin dashboard is there but your products and the shopping cart,widgets and all are not on your site. Your purchase log is gone and there are permalinks leading places that seem not to exist.Before you freak out and lose your cool, don’t get too scared: everything is still in your database.But you will probably have to redo all your product images.The latest version is so much better so don’t let this stop you from upgrading.

Things new to the latest version are:
A Latest Products widget which shows product thumbnails in your sidebar and is invaluable.

Permalinks!
I never thought they’d give us permalinks, did you? Now the plugin is miles closer to SEO. If only there weren’t a tables layout and a load of < br > s that aren’t closed…
The ability to edit the Category link which shows in the sidebar to whatever you want it to say.The Categories list is no longer called Categories but “Product Groups” and so the widget is no longer called “Products and Brands” but Product Groups. This is one of the better improvements. I can well put up with a days work to have a better functioning free shopping cart,can’t you?

Fixing product images:

You may not have this problem but I did: Product thumbnails not getting displayed in the product pages or in the Latest Product widget.
I found that uploading a seperate thumbnail when editing a product solved the issue of the missing pic in the products page but I had to view the source of the sidebar widget to see why my thumbs weren’t being displayed there. It was just a matter of uploading a new thumb via FTP to the uploads/wpsc/thumbnail folder with the same name as was described in the link in the source…
I haven’t got a clue as to why the newest version of this amazing plugin does this with product images. The good news is that it is fixable.
With cforms from deliciousdays I lost my forms because the upgrade didn’t actually upgrade. I’m not sure what it did but the results were I had to do it myself and then redo my forms. Now I am wiser and have backed up my forms. Most likely what happened was some kind of time out during the FTP process that caused things to go awry.

Any time one upgrades one should take care to save a copy of the old version if they have made any code edits. Oftentimes it’s hard to keep track especially if you run a lot of plugins.The auto upgrade function can’t save your carefully thought out edits. But then, if you are the kind of WordPress user that makes carefully thought out code edits you don’t need me to tell you this as you are very clever and need no hand-holding and are probably writing a plugin as I write this..

Conflict with Next Gen Gallery and WP-shopping Cart

When I was setting up my friend’s new site I installed Next Gen Gallery.
Then she needed to be able to sell stuff so I installed WP Shopping Cart.
Then the madness began!
Thumbnails were doing cartwheels and somersaults or not opening at all.Or double images were appearing for each thumbnail.Was it a Poltergeist? A Gremlin? Nope: just 2 copies of scripts doing things together and doubling up everything! Not good.

Why was this happening?

Both plugins use thickbox.js,thickbox.css and lightbox.css.You only need one copy of each installed or you will experience odd performances of the lightbox window when clicking on a thumbnail image either on your shop or gallery pages.

My solution is probably not the best but it worked.
I went to wp-content/plugins and opened the wp-shoppingcart folder.I found thickbox js and css and also lightbox.css and just erased the code from all files,leaving the blank file in the folder.
I thought about deleting these files but then I decided to be on the relatively safe side I’d just leave them but empty.
I should say that separately both plugins work fine,at least when it comes to using the lightbox window).
Problem Resolved.
I should state just for the sake of the easily befuddled that if you do not have both plugins but are still experiencing trouble this solution will not work for you.This is just for trouble had when BOTH plugins are installed into one WP installation!

Fame and Fortune…maybe.

Looks like my one big client might be on the Tyra Banks show.Might be because we all know how these things can seem definite one minute and then you’re bumped off the line-up the next.
Because this is a fetish site and I’m a tad prudish I haven’t included the site in my portfolio.
But if that many people may see the site because they heard about it on the Tyra Banks show you can bet I’m going to add my credit link.
The other reason I never provided my link is that I came on board as the new webmaster to an already designed website.the new pages I made were my design and standards compliant but the old pages were not.I would have to go through about 300+ pages and remake them all in my own theme and templatize them in a sane,organized way.The site uses CuteNews if you can believe that–an outdated but functional CMS.It’s not a very good option because it adds an obtrusive cutenews credit link to every entry of news.I’m just now beginning the transition from CutePHP to WordPress.The other reason is that the bulk of the site is a member’s site and not that many people get to see it unless they want to pay to join up.
So I’m glad that I took the initiative to remake all the tours in my own design.
I’m also glad that I took the initiative to open a Youtube account for my client because it might have been how the Tyra producers even got wind of my client.And I’m even more glad that the site has 0 percent topless and 0 percent bottomless nudity.
Again proving to myself that any website can be run with wordpress I am manually transferring all of the site content to wordpress posts.
Thanks to 2 very handy WPplugins the process has been finetuned to tedious data entry.There was tool to import from cutenews to wp but it erased everything and didn’t grab categories or anything besides text,titles and dates skipping links and images.I might have been inclined to go through each imported posts and put in the right urls,etc.But I wasn’t so inclined.Why make more work for myself than I have to?

Here are the plugins:

I used Ryan’s plugin to make sure that each category had it’s own single post view that included the category page template and sidebar specific to that category,etc.