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I have just managed to come out of the other end of another WordPress minefield. WordPress 2.6 image captions. Being a natural healer, I am trained to search for the cause before embarking on a cure. I should have applied this rule to WordPress. Look around some of the recent posts, and you will see that the images now have a nice background and a caption underneath, and they are aligned in the post as I desire.

This is part of the new whiter than white twodotsix version of WP. However, it didn’t work out of the box, and I was too keen to mess around with the CSS to get it right, before realising it wasn’t that. How did I know? After a fair deal of frustration, I did a vanilla install of 2.6 with the theme I am using here, Simplr. Everything was fine. My upgrade hadn’t gone well. I removed completely the wp-includes and wp-admin folders and replaced them with fresh files. Better. I disabled all plugins. Perfect. I enabled them again one by one until I reached the culprit; wp-typography 1.6. I can live without the plugin, I guess it will get upgraded sometime soon. Until then, enjoy the captions, which I am using to credit the owners of the photographs I use!

In keeping with my desire to have an easy-to-maintain blog, I set about exploring photo plugins. My brief is the following:

• I want to be able to add either a single photo or a set of photos (gallery) to a post or page
• I want the photos to be either uploaded to the webserver or included from flickr
• I want to be able to use lightbox to display the picture(s)
• Not too much hacking of code, this has to be clean

Not a lot to ask, you may think. I came close, but by using two plugins, one for my pictures, another for flickr. However, to avoid conflicts, it ran with two variations of lightbox, one of them thickbox, and this didn’t appeal to me. Each plugin uses it’s own scripts for the lightbox, and they won’t play ball with each other. This will change in the future, plugin authors are being encouraged to check for existing code before introducing their own. But for now I gave up and settled for one plugin; flickr tag which gives me most of the functionality I need. I compromised on not uploading pictures to my server, using flickr for everything instead. There is a bit of syntax to master, but it is worth it. So I can include a single picture:

Or I can insert a set, based on my flickr tags:

It works, but is is frustrating that I didn’t achieve my goals. If anyone knows of a better solution, I am keen to hear about it.

I consider myself an apprentice when it comes to WordPress. I enjoy how easy it is to get running, while at the same time appreciating the ability to tweak things to get it running how I want. I want to say that I have used WP for years, but the truth is that I have tinkered with it, even made some photo-blogs for friends, but personally I haven’t had a blog for about two years. I trod the path of blogger, movable type and settled with WP, and here I am!

The tweaking I mentioned before is just to get things operational after installing the current version of WP, 2.51.

1. I use hosting, this gives me greater control over my blogs, however some of the general settings are not suitable for my taste. First off, I need to add hot-linking to the new site. This stops people stealing your bandwidth by linking directly to pictures, media on your site. This I have to do in cPanel, otherwise none of my graphics appear.

2. My hosting partner is based in USA, whereas I am located in Central Europe. I often use characters from different alphabets, so the ISO-8859-1 character set is not good for me. Before posting anything, install the UTF-8 Database converter plugin. It will whine about not being the correct version of WP, but I have not had any problems yet with version 2.51. Caveat emptor!

3. I like the new media upload facility introduced in 2.51, but… I couldn’t get it to upload anything. I hunted around for ages, and eventually the problem turned out to be an apache security setting which needs to be over-ridden in your .htaccess file. What I needed was to add this to the file:

SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off

I noticed that this had been a common problem, and thus had become a plugin, covering various Apache versions.

So to conclude, I am quite happy with the ease in which a blog can be ready, using a few mouse clicks, and a few plugins. I can still manually install WordPress if I need to, and I can tweak the database to use a different character encoding, but I feel it’s easier to “sell” to others the idea of a relatively trouble-free setup.