The first AWSOM plugin video tutorial, titled ‘Create Your First AWSOM Pixgallery Image Gallery Page‘, is now available at the AWSOM.org website. This first tutorial is for the AWSOM Pixgallery plugin for Wordpress and is designed to show you how to set up your first image gallery in just a few minutes.

I plan on adding new tutorials over time to detail out all of the different capabilities of this plugin as well as others in the AWSOM series. Upcoming tutorials will feature how to use the FastFlow method of setting up your AWSOM Pixgallery image/gallery captions as well as details on how the different settings in Pixgallery affect your gallery look and feel.

Please feel free to contact me or leave comments if you have specific ideas for tutorials you’d like to see. I’m also considering creating regular Wordpress video tutorials which would go through the core areas of Wordpress set up and usage.

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I’ve had a few reports come in that people using the AWSOM News Announcement plugin or Pixgallery have been having some issues displaying different language types, most notably Asian or other non-English based character sets. The fix for these issues with AWSOM plugins, or any other plugins displaying this phenomenon, is within the Wordpress database. When a database is set up in MySQL one of the things you can assign to it is the language encoding type. In addition, all of it’s fields and tables can also be assigned a language encoding type. By default MySQL utilizes Swedish as it’s encoding type (MySQL was developed in Sweden). Wordpress typically tries to set up it’s database as UTF-8. In some cases this doesn’t work right, especially if the admin has updated their version of Wordpress continually from a version previous to Wordpress 2.1.x where this wasn’t defined.

So, the fix is to go to the database directly though phpmyadmin or another database editor and change the language type for the affected Tables and fields to the language type that you need to display. For AWSOM plugins it’s pretty obvious which tables are for what plugin by their name (I make great pains to place the plugin name as the table name)

In extreme cases you can contact me to help you out, but the best bet is to do a google search for how to use phpmyadmin.

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Anyone who is getting an internal server error 500 when trying to activate or use plugins in Wordpress 2.5: This is likely due to a memory issue in PHP. I’m not sure why, but I’ve noticed that the new version of Wordpress seems to push much harder on the memory of a server, especially during plugin activation. It appears that this internal error 500 situation may be related to a PHP setting that by default limits PHP to using only 8MB per instance. The way to resolve this issue is to up the amount of memory usable by PHP to 16MB in the php.ini config file. In most cases you won’t be able to do this yourself but will need to request your server admin do this for you.

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I have just released new versions of the AWSOM Pixgallery(4.5.3), AWSOM News Announcement(1.4.2), and AWSOM Uninstaller (1.0.2) plugins for Wordpress that have been made specifically compatible with the upcoming Wordpress 2.5 release (the AWSOM Archive plugin was already fully 2.5 compatible with version 1.4.0). This means that they will install properly and work as they currently do. AWSOM plugin versions previous to these new releases will NOT install properly on Wordpress 2.5 due to a major change in their plugin protocol (though I believe that already installed plugins will not stop working, I can’t guarantee that–especially if you deactivate/reactivate them during the Wordpress upgrade process).

I will probably come out with another minor release of the plugins after Wordpress 2.5 is officially released that does some cosmetic changes to my admin pages for the plugins, but this will have to wait until they finalize the CSS they are using for their admin pages (right now they all look fine, but don’t really match the new look of the admin area in 2.5). For the moment though everything will work properly, so you at least have one less worry if you plan on upgrading to Wordpress 2.5 :)

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Hi everyone, A preview version of Wordpress 2.5 has been posted at the Wordpress.org website and from what I see after trying it out I expect to see a major flameup of epic proportions on their forum after it gets released. The most obvious and major issue is any plugin that adds fields to the database will almost certainly fail to work right in the new version unless updated specifically for it. They have altered the way plugin activation works–developers, you will need to specifically declare any global variables used in your activation function during table activation and creation to be global outside of the function (not just within it). This is not normally required and I highly doubt any current plugins do this–so they will all most likely fail to install their tables properly.

This points to one major issue I see with the Wordpress development team–they have a very limited acceptance of the idea of backward compatibility. Starting with version 2.2 they have released new major versions that actively break backward compatibility on a wide range of plugins and themes. While I understand that this is sometimes needed for security reasons, in these cases it was simply because they redesigned the way something worked. This is where a “compatibility mode” or some other backward compatibility mode is really required.

In my plugin AWSOM Pixgallery I recently released a new version (4.5.x) that also saw a redesign of the way something works: image and gallery captions. What did I do? I added in a new setting called “Legacy Mode” that can be turned on to display captions in the old manner. It’s a crutch until people who are upgrading have time to update their captions to the new system. Actually, you don’t HAVE to ever update your captions, but in some cases some new features will require the new system to be operating to work–but that’s an option for the admin, not a requirement.

The real problem with this system of forced change is that it actively pushes people to NOT upgrade. Many Wordpress users are not technical people. They don’t know, and don’t have time or want to know, how to go in and edit their theme files or plugins. In a perfect world every plugin writer would upgrade their stuff immediately, but in some cases plugins are no longer being developed, so they won’t get upgrades. This becomes a major issue when security upgrades are also involved, since many users who won’t upgrade now get left with insecure older versions of Wordpress in place. If your site works now, but you try to upgrade and it bombs and you don’t know how to fix it, you are stuck and will probably just revert to the older one.

A “you should learn how to code” response to people will not work. A “Find another plugin/theme” response will not work. People like what they have and just want it to work.

I really like Wordpress. I’m pretty much unaffected by these changes because I know how to program and make the changes necessary to get things to work right. But I also expect to get a huge amount of support requests because of changes to the way plugins now work. I’ll be updating my plugins to work, and will release new versions in the next day or so. But I suggest any developers out there get ready for the storm, cause it’s on the way.

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