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.
