ADMIN: Temporary Site Funkiness

The good folks who support the popular WordPress software — used by a bazillion sites, including Running After My Hat — recently introduced a new version. It’s not the first time they’ve done so, not by a long shot, and it’s not even a “major” upgrade.

But it has played holy hell with working on blog posts, for me and many others.

One reason for WP’s popularity is the huge variety of plugins and extensions which independent developers have built for it over the years, to add features to the way blogs run and are built. Another reason is the proliferation of easily installable (and then customizable) themes; think of these as design templates. Put these two reasons together and you’ve got a single big reason why WordPress support can’t identify, in the new version, anything in particular which might be causing problems for bloggers. It seems to work just fine for many… and for many others, it seems to work just catastrophically badly.

I’m somewhere in the middle.But what doesn’t work is driving me crazy.

WP support offers to bloggers the only solution possible under the circumstances: turn off all plugins and extensions, and set aside whatever theme you’re using — falling back on the default theme for the new version. Then add back into the mix each feature you want or need, one at a time, testing how things go before trying the next. When it breaks again, voilà! — you’ve found the source of the offending glitch(es).

IMPORTANT: Note that none of this applies to site visitors. You don’t have to do anything. These instructions apply just to the people who blog with WordPress (create and update posts, design sites, and so on) and are experiencing problems.

As I said, it may be — is — the only solution possible. But it also has the potential to become one tedious slog, during which one familiar feature or another of the site stops working. (Just for starters, as long as the custom theme is disabled, everything will look different — very, very different.) Please bear with me during this time. I will probably start tinkering with this sometime over the weekend. (And — who knows? — maybe the problem will turn out to be something easily fixable.)

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I do have a couple of advantages in the fight:

First, RAMH certainly doesn’t carry a lot of user traffic. So it’s not like many, many people are going to be inconvenienced.

And second, I’ve been working with software a looooong time. (Just this past March was 35 years.) I’ve got some ideas about how to test and diagnose the problems a little bit at a time, based on the nature of the problems I’m having.

(For example, none of my problems seem to be with the site interface as viewed by visitors/readers — “only” with the admin/behind-the-scenes elements. So it’s unlikely that, say, the little audio-player thingum I use for playing music here needs to be disabled.)

Still, it’s going to be a pain in the rear. I’ll probably create tomorrow’s whiskey river post using some other software, then just copy-and-paste it into the editor here, all at one go. After that, even before, don’t be surprised if something you’re used to seeing at the top right here suddenly disappears, or moves to the bottom of the page, or whatever.