Well, after fixing some bugs in Hide Dashboard, a new version has been put up. Hopefully, this version will now work the way you think it will work vis-a-vis the options 
Also, Serene Theme has been updated to keep in line with Hide Dashboard’s Meta Widget changes.
Hide Dashboard Plugin (version 1.3)
Serene Theme (version 1.1)
Enjoy!
Here’s some new photographs from Koh Samui. Of particular interest are the two HDR images I created from the clouds at sunset. They were created by bracketing a full stop across 5 shots (-2 to +2) and using Photomatix Pro.
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:
MyGallery to WordPress Converter 1.1
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 Hopefully, this current set of software will last, oh, at least the next ten minutes, before being considered out of date.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!
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.