scrumpy jack

Going on a rampage

Just wanted to let you all know that I’ll be going on a little rampage tonight. I’ve just spent near enough the entire day porting an install of WP eCommerce over from the development site to the live site.

Why has it taken me this long? Well I had a number of problems, but the main one was to do with product pages not displaying correctly. Instead of using the WP eCommerce theme files, these pages insisted on using the standard ‘page.php’ Wordpress template file.

I have literally pulled my hair out and you know what it was? Another plugin. That’s right. Whoop-de-doo. One little deactivation was all it took… @^£&*E£@%(*!!)(*@&£%(*!@

Why is it possible that plugins like this can cause conflicts? Automattic should’ve done something about this a long time ago! I am setting up a site for this as we speak.

But this leads me to another annoyance. While I was playing around with getting things working I noticed that the categories I’d set up in WP eCommerce were conflicting with other pages that already existed. Why? Well this is all down to Wordpress’ obscure permalink system and how some plugins just can’t work with it.

The whole plugin ecosystem really is a mess. It’s the embodiment of a contradiction: it is both the biggest selling point and the weakest part of the whole Wordpress collective. A big black mark against using Wordpress as a full-on CMS in my opinion and one thing (among a few others) that need some serious attention.

The thing that worries me the most is that I don’t think Wordpress will get that attention. And I loathe the idea of touching all that spaghetti code myself…

I think we desperately need a new open source blogging platform that embraces overall better practices, but still exudes the same simplicity and overall friendliness of Wordpress.

Is such a thing possible?

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Wordpress 3.1 Finally Puts a UI on Internal Links

With the introduction of Menus in Wordpress 3, I was clamouring for more link-based goodness. Now with 3.1 - released on Tuesday - the TinyMCE link builder has been extended to make it even easier to link to pages and posts within your blog.

This is a sweet feature for site owners and content creator. The Wordpress development community is continuing to convince me that I’m onto a winner building client sites in Wordpress.

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FS Link Posts - A Simple Wordpress Plugin →

FS Link Posts is a simple Wordpress plugin that I started because I couldn’t find one that provided the functionality I needed, namely: to be able to manually associate a post with other posts of the same type in a really easy-to-use way.

It uses custom fields to store the IDs of manually-selected related posts (so there’s nothing proprietary here!). It just adds a nice UI to the functionality.

I’ve tested it on Wordpress 3.0.1. If you’re using an older version, please try it out still. I am intrigued to see how it holds up. Please feel free to send me all your niggles and ideas.

I hope you find it useful!

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