WordPress frustration

  • most of this is a venting rant, so don’t anyone go getting their panties in a bunch or start bandying about banning threats.
    let me first say that i love the idea of WordPress, and how it’s simpler to use than MT. but after that, getting support for esoteric problems is impossible.
    it’s very hard to believe that out of the 5-6 questions i’ve posted here i’ve had ZERO responses, outside of Fahim continuing a conversation we’d started in email about his Blacklist plugin. no help, no suggestions of what to look for, no offers of ideas of how to proceed next… it’s very frustrating.
    i switched a high profile, high traffic politics group blog off of MT to WP back at the end of August because of system load problems that MT was causing, and i chose to go with a 1.3alpha to save myself some conversion issues from 1.2 to 1.3 later on.
    but the absolute silence i’ve gotten to all of my questions has been rather disconcerting, and definitely not what i’ve come to expect from an open source collective of creative and inquisitive minds. the fact that others have found my posts, and emailed me privately, asking if i got any responses to my questions (and could i possibly tell them, because they’re having the same issue and getting no answers) also troubles me.
    did i make a mistake in going with WordPress, or just a mistake in going with 1.3 too soon? can i at least get one of the developers (or anyone?) to point me at what to look for to find out what’s causing my archives issue? are there limitations in the db or software that makes it not viable for a site like The American Street? will my upgrading to a newer alpha fix these problems, or make them worse? do i have to start an extensive search for a new blogging tool again, and ask some the 50+ contributing authors to learn yet another blogging interface after just a few months? (the more active posters love WP, btw, once they figured out all the little buttons).
    this is a pretty major issue for a politics site that gets a few dozen thousand readers per day, and having no significant archives available on-site is pretty lame.
    little help? please?

Viewing 13 replies - 1 through 13 (of 13 total)

  • Always settle for stable versions. The latest is 1.2.1. What you have is an alpha (not even a beta) so there are a lot of things that can go wrong unless you are up for some debugging.

    The people who answer questions on this forum are just like your self – simple users doing their best to help. I have read all your posts. Once you get into issues to do with plugins being compatible with 1.3 it is a very specialist and not really rewarding field. I say unrewarding because what works today may not work tomorrow. Once the distro begins to stabilise the plugins can catch up. IMHO the advice given here is good. Install 1.2.

    That’s all a little harsh, all I really meant was that on an early alpha like alpha-2 there could be a million things wrong, we can’t really troubleshoot unless you’re on a known situation, be it a stable or the latest nightly.

    Thread Starter desertjo

    (@desertjo)

    thanks for the suggestion, allusion. i do want to upgrade to a newer alpha version, but i’m a little leery of making things worse.
    i also want to completely eliminate any issues that the site designer may have introduced, but i really can’t fathom what she could possibly have done in modifying the CSS that would have gacked up the archives calls.

    By simple – I meant plain and simple -it was not an attack on your IT credentials.
    But the nature of your past questions goes some way to explaining the lack of take up. There may be exceptions but IMHO this is the most helpful, and most informed forum I have ever seen.

    OT, I know, but @Desert-Jo, I was just checking out your site. You may want to check out these links for your “Investigative Journalism and Media Analysis” section:
    https://www.commondreams.org/
    And one of my favorite writers, Robert Jensen, professor of Journalism at UT-Austin (Texas):
    https://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/freelance.htm
    Hope you solve your problem. FWIW, I poked around in your narchives, and it would pull NOTHING up by date, but EVERYTHING by category.
    J

    Thread Starter desertjo

    (@desertjo)

    sorry for the misinterpretation, Root. i know the problems i’m running into are not the garden variety types most users run into, but if i’m the only one, then not enough people are putting the alpha versions through all paces, which is detrimental to everyone else in the long run… it means that what could be an impressive product is merely notable.
    i’m not an old fart, but i’m starting to pine for the days when people took pride in trying to break a product while in the alpha stages, thus ensuring it wouldn’t break when it went gold. i guess Microsoft’s programming standards have permeated farther downstream than i’d imagined ??
    the trackbcak ping bug i ran into seems to have been fixed in versions after 9/22, so current plan of action is to try something from earlier this week. i just have to wait until after the 3rd debate, and take advantage of the late night lulls during the weekend, and see what happens.

    Thread Starter desertjo

    (@desertjo)

    thanks for the feedback, jonimueller…. that actually does help somewhat. kinda rules out a db problem. i just hope Shelley remembers what she changed in the CSS and can unchange it to see if that caused the issue.
    and i’ll check out the Jensen link… sounds like it’d be up my alley, and for a few of the other contribs at the site (i’m not the site editor, just the techie and occassional contributor).

    Well there are plenty of us testing 1.3 to destruction every day I can assure you. That is not quite the same as using it on a high volume and ostensibly important site.

    Alpha-4 is better than alpha-2, we don’t bump the version unless there has been substantial improvements. Future feedback on alpha or beta versions would probably have better luck in the Beta forums which is specific for non-stable versions. Even there though the best fix I can offer with the information you’ve given is to upgrade your WP files to the latest version.

    On the matter of not making things worse: you could copy your current setup over to another directory/server, copy the DB over too, (set new details in config.php obviously), and see if the copy of your site still works. Then, if that’s established, install the latest nightly on top and check whether you’ve broken something really badly.

    Thread Starter desertjo

    (@desertjo)

    figured out part of the problem.
    there’s a problem with this version where if you choose X number of days to show on the index page instead of X number of posts, all of your date related archives stop working. when the site went live, i’d chosen 35 posts for the index page, and left it alone.
    seems like someone else with admin access started mucking around in the Options, and changed it to 6 days, which made everything date related disappear again.
    a third admin caught it and changed it back, but it also uncovered a behavior that i wasn’t aware of… the 6 days bug permeates across all archives, monthly and category, so that all the monthly archives disappear (being that they are older than 6 days), and no category matches older than 6 days will appear either.
    when you change to X number of posts, you only get X number of posts for each month or category. this interesting cascade doesn’t seem to affect the narchives.php script. anyone know if the date bug has been fixed in alpha4?
    and allusion, i had been posting my questions about these problems in the Beta forum, but the lack of response there was what made me crack open and vent here ??

    Some time ago I added the approved code for a single cat and as a side effect the archives refused to show. Wierd stuff.

Viewing 13 replies - 1 through 13 (of 13 total)
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