Orphaned Plugins, Revisited

Although they announced their intentions back in July, the team of coders at MaxBlogPress are embarking on an intriguing journey: to update orphaned and abandoned WordPress plugins deemed worthy of continued survival by the website owners and designers whose sites rely on outdated versions of those plugins.

These are the folks behind the WordPress plugin Max Banner Ads and about 10 others, so if anyone is up to the task, in my opinion, this is the group to get the job done.

So far, they’ve taken on 4 plugins: Flash Fader, Easy Custom Fields, Post Format Control, and Access by Category.

Orphaned Plugins

One of the things I try to remind other webfolks I work with to keep in mind is that when you manage a large number of websites, compatibility between your app, your theme and your plugins can make or break performance. One of those bit me over the past couple of days, so I share!

Two of my major sites haven’t been upgraded because of concerns of older coding (calls) in custom themes. One was running WordPress 2.6.5, the other 2.5.1. After checking everything I could think of (or so I thought), I upgraded the 2.6.5 site to 2.7.1… there’s still a 2.8 compatibility question with one of the plugins.

Everything went well, at first. But within 12 hours, the server the site was on was experiencing high loads and crazy mysqld behavior. I resolved that, but the high loads were back within another 24 hours. I resolved the issue again, but the fact that a pattern of wacky behavior was emerging was a concern.

Taking another look at the active plugins on the recently upgraded site yielded a curiosity… an orphaned plugin with no recorded compatibility issues, good or bad. I say orphaned because the plugin was active, but never actively used, not that it’s development was abandoned. It’s usefulness for us was actually superceded by other tools.

Because it was never used, and it never impacted site performance (as in not one problem in the past 4 years), it was “out of sight, out of mind”… never upgraded either. Thus, the version in use was so old that it was not relevant to the things I had checked. But once the plugin was turned off, issues with the site and server disappeared within minutes.

So now I remind myself of one of the things I would on occassion remind other web peers of.

WordPress, Podcasting, and Changes

I’ve been using WordPress and Podpress to set up podcasting sites for almost 4 years now. I loved Podpress… it made it so easy for people without advanced tech skills to still be able to create a podcast of their own (or at least post it to their site and feed).

I stuck with it even during 2008 when there were no updates and the support forums would vanish without warning, partially out of loyalty to a good plugin (and Dan’s a really nice guy), and partially out of regret for my role in the addition of the Podango functionality to podpress.

The challenge is not finding another podcasting plugin to replace podpress — there are several out there that work just fine. The challenge is converting existing posts from using Podpress to using whatever the new plugin might be.

The other drawback is most if not all of the podpress users in my little enclave like the builtin podpress statistics… the instant gratification of seeing that your new episode has been downloaded 500 times within the first half hour of posting it can be addictive, and getting someone started on using a different stats tool can lead to frustration on both ends.

So this is the start of an experiment. I’m going to be testing out Powerpress from RawVoice (mostly because it will work in tandem with Podpress), and see if I can’t figure out a way to easily convert shows that have between 100-300 previous episodes out there.

I’m not in that big a rush, though. The main reason for my wanting to investigate other podcastin plugin options vanished mysteriously about a month ago. My error logs were bloated with podpress statcounts errors (the infamous duplicate entry for key 1 error), literally for a couple of years… until sometime within the past 4-6 weeks.

The errors just went stopped happening. I’m not sure if they upgraded MySQL or PHP on the server where my sites are, or exactly what happened… I do know that the recent Podpress 8.8.1 maintenance release wasn’t what fixed things, because I’ve only installed it on one site, as a test.

But, I continue to explore.

The Joy of Customization: Streamline

The first of the newly rebranded Studio Press designs that I played with was Streamline. It turned out to be the dream theme I knew was possible but hadn’t ever found until it was released.

For a little over two years, I had been keeping an eye out for a new blog-style theme to implement on the Kick-Ass Mystic Ninjas website. I’d always seen things that came close, but nothing ever struck me as being perfect or near-perfect for what I wanted to do, that matched the vague idea I had in mind for the site’s new look… until Streamline came out.

The front page article listing was exactly what I wanted to use for normal paging throughout the site, and the use of the larger icons with the article listings was the perfect match I’d been looking for.

I had to make a few modifications to get the front page layout style to act as the default article listing throughout the site, but the end result was exactly what I had in mind. Slight modifications to the banner were needed to make it fit the new theme sizing, but those were easily implemented by the graphics guru who’d done the original banner.

This one was one of the fastest and easiest customizations I’ve done, and the result was well worth the wait. But there was one odd drawback that I haven’t resolved yet… my favorite contact form stopped working.

I love WordPress-Ready Contact Form, from the Beast-Blog guys; I’ve used it on at least 10 different websites, and that’s in addition to at least another 10 non-WP sites that use the both the v2 and v3 standalone version of the form. But after I customized this Streamline install, the contact form ceased to work, and even more disturbing was that the Configuration admin page for the form stopped loading.

So for the time being I’ve switched to Contact Form 7, until I get the time to sit down and figure that particular failure out… or post something on the Studio Press support forums and ask for a set of fresh eyes to spot what might be the cause of this conflict, because I haven’t tracked it down yet.

Site: Kick-Ass Mystic Ninjas
Theme: Streamline

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.