One step forward, two back
Last night I had a bit of blast on the site, trying to finish off some of the features I never had time to put in before it went live.
We now have a AJAX powered search feature, currently it is only present on the home page and archive page, not sure if you need it in the side bar on every page or not?
I’ve also sorted, well close too to sorted, the seperation of comments and pingbacks. The styling is not complete but the function is there.
The final feature which is not quite working yet is a ‘mint popular’ list (it’s a clever play on the standard most popular list) on the archives page. However I’m having some problems getting it to call just pages and not files.
So I was pretty chuffed to get all this working, but some where along the line the Falbum plugin decided not to work. I don’t think this is just a plugin issue as the settings and database records are totally trashed. I’m pretty certain everything will work together but I just can’t get the plugin to re-install, every time I upload and activate it remembers the settings from last time, which are not much good.
Back to the drawing board I think.
Mid Week Roundup
Yeah ok so it’s not quite mid-week and infact it’s closer to the weekend than anything but that just about gives you the idea on what it has been like lately.
First off the site.
When Michael announced that r127 of K2 will only run on WordPress2.0 I started thinking, maybe I should upgrade, I mean WordPress2.0 is at release candidate stage, whats the worse that could happen. Well everything appears to work except for permalinks for UTW and FAlbum and for some reason the Live Archives won’t show in Firefox, IE, or Flock; works fine in Safari!
In other news…
Well it finally hit me the other day that it is indeed the festive season. I’m not the most Christmassy of people, I’m no scrooge but I just never really get all tinsled up. But the other day I sat there flicking through the channels and settled on re-runs of Home Alone, how can you not get in the Christmas mood with that film? So now I’m full swing into Christmas and looking forward to only 5 working days left.
FAlbum plugin
I have been using the flickr album plugin by Ramon Darrow for my photo album but after some rooting around this afternoon I decided to switch over to FAlbum.
With a bit of help from Andreas Linde’s great walkthrough it was up and running in no time. This version looks to have nice admin plugin page which made linking to flickr easy as pie, plus it displays all recent photo’s even if they are not collated in sets.
After a few hourse tweaking and setting it all out I went back to modify some other pages and suddenly was faced with a 500 Server Error! What had just fallen apart?
I then spent a few hours getting to the root of the problem and found removing the .htaccess file for the root and removing permalinks solved it. Right turn permalinks back on; works. Turn friendly url’s on photo plugin on; works. Modify a page and save; 500 Server Error!
It turns out that the FAlbum plugin writes to the .htaccess file but in doing so erases the last #End WordPress marker so when you change a page and WordPress updates the .htaccess file it chokes on the FAlbum section. I manually added the WordPress end marker above the FAlbum being marker and so far it looks to be working ok.