Plugins Smackdown
Unintended consequences can be both exasperating and fun, depending on the circumstances.
When you’re working on a client’s site, discovering that two of your plugins don’t play nicely in the same sandbox can be exasperating. But figuring out which ones are butting heads, and then testing the combination over and over to make sure you’ve got the right combination of culprits can be fun.
That’s really why we have test sites, to see exactly what we can break, and if need be, how many times we can break it!
In this case, discovering that the Featured Content Gallery plugin from the gang over at RevolutionTwo falls down hard when you install the WP e-commerce plugin was amusing at first. When it turned out that the only way to untangle the mess is to manually dig out all of the tables from the WP database because the “Uninstall” feature in WP e-commerce doesn’t work at all, it was mildly annoying.
When further digging led to the knowledge that they are incompatible, and info at the RevTwo forums suggested that a workaround isn’t coming any time soon, it was very disappointing.
Two sites I’m putting together were initially going to use Featured Content Gallery, and third is using Smooth Gallery, which FCG is based on. WP e-commerce breaks both of them, and breaks them hard.
Needing to find two different solutions wasn’t something I had planned on needing to do… but one of the FCG sites didn’t really need to use that plugin, so putting WP e-commerce on there wouldn’t be a problem. When my other client is ready, I’ll be buying the Shopp plugin for her site, and if that plugin does the trick, that’ll be my second alternative.
Getting Things Started
The beginning was so long ago, starting there isn’t very practical.
Suffice to say that based on what seems like a daily interaction with Wordpress over the past 4 years, and complete and constant immersion in it over the past 2 years, I’ve learned quite a bit about how to get done what I want to get done in WordPress. That, combined with an extensive number of years experience as a Unix sysadmin playing with websites and open source apps, and for the first time in a long time, I started having fun with creating websites again.
Over the past two years, I’ve also seen some of the wonderful things very talented coders have been able to do with WordPress, and especially with some amazing advances in the design of themes, and the number of high quality themes and plugins now available.
I’ve also chatted with some of those coders, and inevitably, the good ones get so busy that they can’t offer their support or services as frequently as they previously had, not even for paid projects.
The thought of that stayed in the back of my mind, and after churning out what I thought were 4 pretty nice websites (based on the feedback I began receiving for them) it seemed like a good idea to try my hand at offering my experience for sale to those who could use it. I have and will continue to offer help and suggestions freely, when possible, and I believe there can be a happy balance between the two options.
I’m not a graphics designer… I know enough Photoshop to be dangerous, and that’s about it. But what I do have is a unique set of skills acquired over a long career, skills that…
(Yes, I love movies, and books and television as well… why do you ask?)
that now make it possible for me to provide different types of solutions for different scenarios, and right now, WordPress has become my first choice for a solution base to start from. If there’s a need for a lot of graphics work, that’s when I turn to friends who are gifted in that arena, or spend a lot of time browsing stock photography websites.
This site will be a place to for me to write down some of my experiences and thoughts about website options, and a good place to reach me if you’d be interested in my assistance with a project or some troubleshooting. My hope is that any tips and tricks I’ve learned and keep learning can help out someone in need of the same trick someday.
Be seeing ya!
