SkyyKorat

Thanks for the answer.

Unfortunately, the person with whom I spoke didn’t HAVE any details. He just sent me someone’s BLOG on optimizing WordPress and declared that my site, which has never been live, and only has ONE visitor, ME, had crashed Bluehost’s server and was therefore being “throttled”. He declared that my “site” was encountering (or causing) errors, and “suggested” I hire a developer to optimize the site or better yet, pay THEM to do it…
He then declared there was nothing else he could do, and disconnected the call.

After creating the post in here, I called BACK to Bluehost and got a DIFFERENT person. This time, he looked at the error_log folder and found that there hasn’t been a single error logged from my WordPress site since April 5th when I removed NextGen Gallery and installed Photo Seller.
Then he put me on hold and went to see what was ACTUALLY going on, and returned in a few minutes to tell me they were rebooting the server, and it had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH MY CURRENT SITE (which has been up for AT LEAST 5 years) OR MY NEW WORDPRESS SITE. To my question as to why I was “throttled” and sent the optimizing blog, he admitted the person I’d ORIGINALLY spoken with was “new”… And since the “new” person had seen the “bad gateway” error he assumed it was because my site was CAUSING A PROBLEM by using an EXTREMELY LARGE AMOUNT OF RESOURCES… Person 2 said he’d spoken with the original phone answerer and helped him to understand that his assumption was incorrect…

SO, apparently the non-existent site WASN’T the problem, and I just went through a wasted hour reading some POS blog post that droned on interminably about needing MORE servers and FASTER hardware and the joys of Amazon’s load sharing and the EVILS of having plugins BUT THAT I SHOULD INSTALL ADDITIONAL PLUGINS TO OPTIMIZE THE SITE…

I understand that competent technical support is largely a thing of the past in this country, but I still find myself surprised at the utter ineptitude of my top four WORST organizations to have to deal with – they being Adobe, DirecTv, Bluehost has now gone from off the list to number 2, and Centurylink still continues to hold the top spot. I’ve never had cable or from what I’ve heard, Comcast would probably be right up there.

Anyhow, things appear to be functional once again – SLOW but functional – now they Bluehost has rebooted whatever needed rebooting.

Unfortunately, the response wasn’t responsive. Have now requested that she actually provide answers to the questions asked. I’m learning (slowly but surely) to be far more skeptical of everything associated with WordPress…

Which is fine, I reckon, as long as some random new person who wanders in understands they can’t count on ANY support. I’ve had questions about the shopping cart plugin I was using sitting there for a week. I just deleted the plugin and deleted the bookmarks to the questions ’cause it’s clear I’m NOT going to get any useful assistance.

If they’re so short-handed or so busy they can’t check to see what problems their customers are having at least once a week…

Done. Hopefully, they’ll get back to me with whether or not the Pro version will do what I want.

I’m willing to do the 100 hours, although I’ve already wasted a lot more than that just trying to get a set of pieces that are at least marginally usable.

I’d certainly hope your hundred hours included getting reasonable responses in a timely manner to at least point you in the right direction from the people that wrote whatever you’re using… If not, you must have massive skills ’cause otherwise I can’t see HOW you’d find and modify some of this stuff in a reasonable amount of time…

I’ve been trying to figure out how to do a simple thing like getting the shipping to print on the shopping cart for days, chasing things, trying to figure out what does what to what… It’d be a lot easier if I could get something to print when I do an echo or print, but that’s ANOTHER of those questions I’ve asked that hasn’t gotten any answer. It would be even EASIER if I could get the developer to point me in the right direction, but that isn’t happening either.

Thanks for the replies… The home page isn’t the problem. Appearance>customize has made that adequate. My home page has the things on it that I need. There are things I wish were slightly different about the theme, but I haven’t been successful getting a reply from the theme maker, so it’s not just plugins where you’re left to wander in the dark.

My problem is the gallery plugins with rigid structures that aren’t adaptable to the way I’d like to present information to my users. And especially the shopping cart plugins that either cost more than it’s worth to take on the work myself (as opposed to leaving it to my current provider) or are so rigid and/or limited they’re useless.

The digital items aren’t the problem. Getting those to a client is easy. It’s presenting the images (albums/galleries) and managing the shopping cart (shipping/no shipping, etc) that’s the problem. As I said, I’ve had a half dozen questions sitting for days with no response. There would be more as I try to customize the plugin but I figure it’s a waste of time to keep posting questions that get ignored by the developer(s).

I’m not sure what the interpretation of “simple” should be. In my world, in 2016, I feel that what I’m doing is “simple”. I’m not selling a million drastically different products – I’m selling two – prints and downloads. There may be 5000 instances of prints and/or downloads, but it’s just two products. With one payment thing – either you go through Paypal or you send me an email. Seems simple to me, but I may not be recognizing the complexities of something.

WORST CASE, if I absolutely can’t get the shopping cart to work the way it has to for me to be willing to present it to users, I’ll dump it and post a price list on the site and anyone that orders will have to contact me. But in my mind that’s a rather sad step backward about 10 years.

I found the css code that controls the filename on the detail images and change the size.

I found where the “search” thing was displayed and commented it out, so if there’s no setting for me to turn it off, I’ll just not let it show.

I also found the code that display the information when hovering and commented that out too.

If there’s a way to manage these in settings, that would be great, but if I have to, I can turn them off and just not let the plugin update.

At a minimum, if I can’t modify the above behavior, can you tell me the name of the variable with the next or previous gallery, and I’ll just comment out the code that displays them. That way a user CAN’T jump directly from gallery to gallery.

Does this mean no such thing exists, or is it just REALLY quiet around here?

Hi Melissa. Thanks for your reply… As you can probably tell, I’m somewhat new to the whole WordPress world.

1. I wasn’t aware widgets lived in sidebars. Another new thing to know!

2. I”m calling the “header bar” the black thing above my header image. I’ve got the layout/header SET to “Navigation Below” and all the social things turned off. I’ve set the menu to the Navigation menu, and this makes my header image fit the available area, which is nice, but it puts the MENU right over the top of the image. I haven’t been able to get it to stop that.
What I’d LIKE to have is my header image – the image in Background Images/Header, NOT have the navigation menu on top of it. I wanted the navigation menu on the page below the background header image. Is that possible?
If, on the other hand, I put the navigation menu ABOVE the background header image, even though I’ve tried sizes from 1024×148 to 1440×184 for that image, they ALL get squished down to a small image about 800 px wide in the center. It works but it’s kinda ugly… If I HAVE to have the navigation menu above the image, is there a way for me to get the image as wide as the center section so it looks normal?
I”ll go read the simple start handbook and make docs and see if I can figure all this out from there.
BTW: Here’s a link to a picture of what I’m talking about…
https://www.dperezphoto.com/headers.jpg

Hello?

Thanks Jacob. I had a chance to install the development version yesterday and have been playing. This definitely makes it easier when you have more albums…

OK, I need to know exactly which setting will change the album thumbnail sizes and keep their original aspect ratio. Everything I’ve found online said the album thumbnails were LOCKED to 91×68 in the code.

Yes, I’ve modified the code. Would you be so kind as to point me to the css I need to change the inter-row spacing for album thumbnails? Or does that also fall under the “we cannot reasonably offer suggestions”?