DeepWave

I’ve finally found some time to update my two plugins - Hide Dashboard and MyGallery to WordPress Converter. In short, the following changes were made:

Hide Dashboard 1.2

• Added option to block access to the Dashboard via the URL Location bar
• Added option to allow authors and editors to view the Dashboard and other admin section pages

MyGallery to WordPress Converter 1.1

• Bugfix to import the description and caption (alttext) fields from MyGallery into WordPress as well.
• Added a variable to allow users to change the path of their MyGallery installation if it is different from the default directory

Hopefully, these changes will make the plugins more useful.

As a follow up to my rant in a previous posting, I’ve actually done something about it and put it on the net. Maybe someone can find it useful. Anyhow, I’ve updated my WordPress, and made various changes and updates overall. Hopefully, this current set of software will last, oh, at least the next ten minutes, before being considered out of date.

I’ve added a whole lot of photographs from the past year (wow, does it seem that long?). These include photos from the Night Safari, Sentosa and Japan.

There are also many new photographs in all the other sections too.. Check it out.

So, WordPress 2.5 has just been released. Its new gallery system is really good, I would like to use it. Unfortunately, the WordPress team only added such a feature in to the basic system long - far too long - after picasa and flickr made web galleries a norm. So WordPress users like me had to turn to advanced plugins like myGallery and features like Lightbox to add those much needed “flash”. And now, there is no clear upgrade path for users (who had no choice earlier but to use those plugins) to convert to the WordPress gallery.

Some of the gallery schemes used in WP25 conflict with myGallery, and they cannot co-exist until myGallery is updated. Thankfully, Alex Rabe’s NextGen Gallery  has been updated in time. But this is cold comfort for someone like me. When I chose myGallery, NGN was nowhere to be found. And now, with say hundreds of images in myGallery, what is the next step?

The WordPress development team should take into account the issues faced by users who had to deal with WP adding features into core that third party developers provided. The whole thing with Tagging is being repeated with media galleries. What’s next - caching?

Furthermore, at this point, I can’t even run the myGallery and WP25 gallery side-by-side. So I have to convert to NextGen Gallery (which thankfully has an import from myGallery function), then upgrade to WP25? This is a big job needing Big Hairy Balls. And all the time, there is this banner reminding not just me, but all my subscribers that I need to upgrade.

I am not objecting directly to the fact that the WordPress development team has adopted third-party features into core. I am merely saying that when they do something like that, the WP development team should consider the impact on people who did use the third-party function and made it so popular that it was folded into core. It is like screwing the very users who “voted” that the feature is a good one in the first place. If this sort of thing keeps going on, plugin developers will get pissed off and maybe I should bite the bullet and consider Expression Engine - at least I can scream dollars and sense into them.

Some new photographs have just been added, mostly from my recent trip to Japan. Amongst the categories updated are Animals, Portraits and Kids. There are also good shots of Mount Fuji and Hakone in the Portfolio section.

Phew! What a day!

I must admit, there were times when I was sitting nervously in front of my PC, wondering if things were going to be OK, or if I would end up wiping out several hundred MB worth of online web data. Of course I have backups! But even with backups, it is still scary when performing major surgery on a website..

Anyway, I have since upgraded WordPress from 2.0.5 to 2.3.1, and at the same time, changed and updated various plugins and so on and so forth. Upgrading the WordPress itself was a breeze. I also used the Maintenance Mode plugin to lock people out until I was ready to have them back in. Since was was going to redo all the plugins and themes, I just threw away most of the wp-content folder, and just upacked the new WordPress. Copied over the wp-config.php file, run the upgrade program, and boom, website is back online. Then I added all the plugins, themes and widgets, enabled them and spent some time configuring them for their various options etc. All this, I did for both DW.Net and for Route 901.

Then came the really scary portion. I decided to change the DB collation type from the default latin1/latin1_swedish_ci to UTF-8. Luckily, I had the UTF-8 Database Converter plugin from g30rg3_x to help me. Now, the plugin has very scary warning pages saying it doesn’t support WP 2.3.1, and you can lose all your data, yadda, yadda, yadda. However, I was already completely out of my mind by the time I reached this point, and said, “F* Me!” and hit “Go”…

I was incredibly lucky, and  everything worked. All the pages, etc were still there, and nothing was lost.

That was when the sky fell down. All the graphics from the MyGallery plugin was missing. It seemed that the gallery information and images were all still there and correct, but it kept looking for an “a” folder in the URL. I tried to go look in phpMyAdmin and see if there was a problem with the table data, thinking maybe I could edit the fields by hand. No luck, the database looked OK. Fearing the worst, I was about to go hacking around in MyGallery code to see where the problem was, when on a hunch, I decided to try disable the MyGallery plugin, and re-enable it. Wah-lah, what do you know, it worked. I just needed to resetup and reconfigure the MyGallery plugin and everything was back to normal.

After that, it was a matter of  editing tags, rechecking post/page data and so on and so forth. But, basically, things were back to normal. So, here we are, with DeepWave.Net 4.1 - do check out the new Serene Theme and the updated Hide Dashboard plugin - both of which are being released at the same time and used at this site.

It should be noted that the site upgrade also owes its success to one key unsung hero: XAMPP Lite.

The entire upgrade process and all themes, plugins and widgets was tested and rehearsed on my Windows PC before a single modification was made to the live server. This rehearsal even included real live database data from the server imported into the XAMPP test environment. I am happy to say that thanks to XAMPP, the upgrade process was smooth and generally uneventful except for the one problem with the UTF8 conversion and MyGallery plugin.

Conclusion: All’s well that ends well, and hello to widgets, tags and shoutboxes!

With the major update to DeepWave.Net, the theme used here is now available for download. Much thanks for Connections by Patricia Müller, Autumn Concept by Ed Merritt and of course, Kubrick by Michael Heilemann for the inspiration.

Download

One of the most common comments about the Hide Dashboard plugin was that while it “hid” the dashboard, it did not change the default view of subscribers when they log in (which is still the Dashboard). The new updated Hide Dashboard gives you an option to use its own Meta section as a widget (instead of the WordPress default), and thus bypassing the Dashboard completely for subscribers. This makes it more seamless and cleaner for subscribers.

Hide Dashboard Plugin

Three new Palm related articles have just been posted. They tell the story of how I managed to move my data out of my Palm Treo 650 into the Mozilla suite of products. As everyone knows, the Palm data formats are highly proprietary, and so moving the data to Mozilla means that at least I can still read/write the data in the future. Plus, since I use Mozilla on the desktop all the time, this means my phone and my desktop can be truly synchronised once and for all. Check out the articles:

• Difficulty HotSyncing your Palm Databases
• Convert your Palm OS Contacts to vCard
• Convert your Palm OS Calendar to iCal

Why did I really need to move my data into Mozilla in the first place? Well, because I recently got a new Samsung SGH-i600 Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone. ActiveSync will only sync your contacts and calendar with MS Outlook and not Outlook Express. Since I don’t use Outlook, I have to get ActiveSync to sync with my Mozilla suite instead. I never thought I’d say this, but moving to a MS Windows platform forced me to use open standards/source formats, data and applications! I’ll try to post some information about my SGH-i600 setup in the future.

I’ve been using the PalmOS platform since the Palm III days. During this time, I’ve bought and upgraded no less than 5 PalmOS powered devices - the Palm III, Palm V, Palm m505, Tungsten T3 and the Treo 650. The latest Treo 680 and Treo 750v simply add nothing new to the equation while I’ve been needing 3G support for global roaming and generally, a roadmap from Palm on the future of this platform to assure me that it will still be around in a year or two’s time. With the Apple iPhone setting the bar very high for 2007/08, Palm has to show something to inspire customers to stay with them and not just rely on blind customer brand/platform loyalty to continue in the future.

So, the sad day arrived, Hell froze over and I have gone over to the dark side. I guess this will be the last Palm related articles I post unless I decide to go back to it one day in the future. The good news is, now that I am in Mozilla, which is open, I can go to any platform, not just Palm, quickly and easily.

OK, so right after my posting about the Mental Minister, I fired an email to a good friend of mine, MT, who said “Eeks!” and promptly did an “information alert” to certain people.. The end result is that in less than 24 hours, the situation has been remedied

They sure work fast, but the screen caps recording this minor bump in the Information Superhighway have been preserved for all time…

EDIT: Check out the Wikipedia Diff