I recently discovered something was wrong with my site. One of my most successful and popular posts was not getting much love. Worse than that, it was no longer on the top of the search engines for it’s keyword/phrase. Turns out the page in question wasn’t displaying correctly. In fact, it was pretty much a blank page. A little trial and error revealed the problem. A plugin I used to embed images into the post was not working right and thus messing up the whole page. Remove the offending image and the page displayed fine (minus the pretty picture). Problem is, I’ve used this plugin for quite some time and the problem exists on quite a few pages. What to do, what to do…
Kill it!
That’s right, I’ve made the hard choice of deactivating the plugin. Couple of reasons. One, it won’t support the next version of Gallery. Two, it doesn’t look like my web host is going to get better at PHP memory limits (I suspect this is the root problem). The issue now is, how to repair all the missing images. I’m not sure how that’s going to work but I’m going to try a couple things. But for now at least, all my pages will show up.
In the mean time, you could help by leaving a comment about the missing pictures when you find them so I can easily and quickly replace them with the built in image gallery. Look for random 4-digit numbers within any post and let me know what you find. Also, if you see any other problems, let me know about those too.
Want to help me get a jump start? Search for <WPG2> and leave a comment with the phrase “Kill It”. Comments will be edited or deleted after each page is fixed. By the way, you can also search for wpg2id (thanks Aylwin)
There has to be an easier/better way than manual editing. Really there does.
So, what’s the before and after code look like (as in, what has to change, as this determines how hard it will be to do a find/replace at the DB level)
Oh no, what about your wife’s site? Does this mean no upgrades for her? It’ll be a huge pain de-integrating WPG2 from her site, no? Perhaps consider switching web hosts?
Well, at least I get to spam you with “Kill it!” comments. :p
By the way, you can also search for “wpg2id”: http://archshrk.com/index.php?s=wpg2id
@Pete – the problem is not finding the before/after code, it’s converting the 4-digit id number to the corresponding image. I may do better with Aylwin’s suggestion though.
@Aylwin – Sadly Julia’s site will have to wait for the WP 3.0 upgrade until after I resolve the Gallery issue. I think the WP-Gallery-Remote and Lightbox2 plugins might be the way to go for her too. I’ll test drive it on my site first. Another thought is to make her gallery more closely match her blog. So it has the illusion of being embedded.
BTW – for those not familiar with WPG2, Aylwin worked closely with the WPG2 developer so he really knows his stuff. Be sure and visit his site for more cool, tech fun.
So, how does the plugin do it?
Whatever the plugin does normally, you can automate with a script for it.
(I have written such scripts in the past)
I don’t know HOW the plugin did the job but it basically linked an image from my Gallery2 install to the blog post. It would be nice if there was a way to convert all the short code into absolute paths but then I’d still be dependent on the Gallery2 links staying put. What I’d like to do is convert all the G2 images into WP images, which only seems possible if done manually (or with far more time developing the script).