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Don’t Update Too Fast
This is becoming a standard cautionary statement I post now with every WordPress release: Don’t rush to upgrade to 2.7. They have made some major changes to the Plugin architecture which will cause many Plugins to break. As far as I can see, 2.7 is not a critical security update so you can afford to wait a bit and do some testing first. As has been more and more typical I hear that many people now always wait until the .1 release of WordPress (so in this case 2.7.1) before they upgrade because they expect many issues and bugs to be present. Personally I’m not a big fan of the “we need to release software by X date” method of development since it typically causes these types of problems. Things should be released when they reliably work.
Oh Well.
Anyway, If you are using AWSOM News or AWSOM Pixgallery you will have issues editing or deleting entries through the admin interface in 2.7. Once the official release is available I’ll update the Plugins to correct the issues. So if either one of these Plugins are critical to your site I again suggest you wait awhile before upgrading. You might avoid a huge hassle.
Automattic: You’ve Just Got To Stop This Crap, Now!
Ok, I have to admit something. I’ve purposely been avoiding looking at WordPress 2.7. After all of the mess that’s been characterized by the last few releases of WordPress (and by mess I mean the constant interface changes, constant Plugin structure changes) I really didn’t want any more negative opinions about the direction things are going with WordPress.
But I went and downloaded the Beta 3 version today.
Goddammit, why do you have to go and do these things Automattic? The admin interface is a damn mess now. WHO THE HELL ARE YOU PAYING TO GIVE YOU THIS BAD ADVICE ON DESIGN?????
Seriously, is the intention to make it harder and more inconvenient to administer your site? Every update to the admin interface places things in more and more difficult places. The idea that you need to scroll vertically to get to things seems to be ingrained now. Guess what guys, most laptops now are WIDESCREEN, and a large percentage of your audience is using them primarily as their main computer. Placing links across the top of the screen makes way more sense that way down a page vertically.
And changing the jargon, terminology, and placement for sections every release is a plain crappy idea. What will we be calling Manage, Design, Appearance, etc. next release guys? Or will we actually have Manage again or now keep pages and posts separate?
Sure makes it real easy for us Plugin developers to maintain compatibility between releases guys–and yes, there are reasons why people don’t update fast or ever, and they aren’t all bad reasons.
I’m really tired of this mess. While I’m obviously capable of making the changes to the code needed for these constant interface changes, It’s becoming less and less worth it to me to do it for anything but my own sites and not bother updating general release Plugins like the ones I host here.
Here’s a clue: Plugin structure is meant to be a set up to allow people to reliably make additions to your basic system that will last over time. You don’t break this idea every release arbitrarily. If so, then that’s called a new version release, not a point release (so 3.0 is okay, but 2.7 is definitely not).
This is basic stuff. Please, let’s get with the program and not keep roiling users, Plugin creators, and Theme editors constantly, it’s getting a bit old now.
WordPress 2.6 issues with AWSOM Pixgallery
I wanted to let everyone know that older versions of AWSOM Pixgallery will not work entirely correctly in WordPress 2.6 based on the changes that have happened in the way certain paths are determined in WordPress. The basic features of Pixgallery should work fine, but certain other features, most notably the automatic default gallery creation during plugin install, the automatic cache folder creation during plugin install, and the “clear the cache folder” function in the Pixgallery Captions admin menu may not work correctly.
The current projected date for release of WordPress 2.6 is July 14 2008, and i expect to have a new version of the Plugin available by that date that fixes these issues, but I just wanted to caution any early adopters to make sure that you know that there could be some issues.
Test File for AWSOM Pixgallery “index.php” permalinks issue now available
Hi everyone, if you haven’t been visiting Harknell.com recently you might not be aware that I’ve been working on a fix for a weird Fancy Permalink issue that causes “index.php” to be added to some people’s AWSOM Pixgallery galleries. This then totally screws up the links to the actual single image page causing 404 errors. I believe I have a fix for this issue, as well as a fix for the Visual Editor problem (where it doesn’t correctly populate the variable names for the tools). So far it has corrected the issue for one person, but I’d appreciate if anyone else is seeing this issue if they could go here: http://www.awsom.org/filerepository/awsompixgalleryabsolutefix2.zip and grab the test file and try this out. You may need to also set the option for “absolute linking” to yes in the Pixgallery options/settings page for the fix to work, but try it without that first. I’d really appreciate it if after trying this out please email me and let me know if it worked (or even more importantly) didn’t work to solve the problem.
AWSOM News Announcement 1.4.3 released
AWSOM News Announcement plugin for WordPress version 1.4.3 has been released and is now available for download at the AWSOM.org website. This version now has it’s own embedded Advanced Visual Editor with more options than the standard WordPress version. This should clear up any issues for users of the WordPress 2.5.x series. It also has built in support for a wider range of web browsers (so this should make Safari users happy).