Wednesday, April 30, 2008

WordPress is Cool - But Can Be VERY Annoying

I really like WordPress. I do. It's easy to install, it has many uses and designs and it helps a lot of people to create blogs and sites. It has a lovely support and development community. It's free. It's cool.

That said, WordPress can really annoy the hell out of you. I started my way with the 2.5 version, and for many days I have battled with a persistent problem - image uploading.

It started with an HTTP Error - every time I tried uploading an image to a post - the upload bar would fill, but the process ended with a message: "Http Error. An error occurred in the upload. Please try again later".

I managed to find a fix for that. Apparently you have to edit your .htaccess file. There's a very good explanation here.

It worked well for a few days, but today I couldn't upload images once again. This time there was no HTTP Error, but something completely different. The image uploaded fine, but when I clicked "Insert to Post" - I got a 404 message - page was not found. Other users reported simply blank pages. The image, of course was not inserted into the post. However - the images WAS uploaded, it WAS present in the Uploads folder, and if you wanted - you could link to it. Still, it was very annoying, and it also caused problems the NextGen plugin .

I use FireFox, by the way, but apparently the problem persists across browsers, OS and servers.

Here is what I tried to no avail:

  1. Updated Flash.
  2. Cleared the cache.
  3. Upgraded to WordPress 2.5.1.
  4. Created another user with an Editor permission.
  5. Opened the WordPress as a single window, with no other tabs open.
  6. Edited the media.php file as suggested here.
  7. Installed the No-Flash Plugin and changed some files for it to work.
  8. CHMOD'ed (changed permission) of the default upload folder (wp-content/uploads).
  9. Created a new uploads folder under wp-content, unticked the "Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders" option and stated a direct URL to the folder.
After some very long hours, pissed as hell, I found a solution that worked, for some unknown reason:

I created a new uploads folder, this time on the server's ROOT. I CHMOD'ed it to 777. Unticked the "Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders". Stated the direct URL to the folder. And it worked. WHY? I don't know. Will it work for you? I don't know. Will there be a bug fix for it? I don't know.

Many people are struggling with this. I hope some can use my stupid solution. I know my way around some code and general problems, but I don't envy people who installed WordPress because they heard it's really easy to use. I guess it's easy to use if there are no bugs.

So, I am annoyed with WordPress today. Never had such problems with Drupal, or even the highly bashed Blogger system. Woof. Now I can get back to work. Until the next bug.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

wordpress spam filter is really worse

Anonymous said...

Agreed. Akismet doesn't work. The only spam filter which works on WordPress is SpamTask, and it costs about 0.01 for every message it checks.

Jacbo said...

I use SpamTask for free? don't think it costs anything. in that case I havn't paid yet :P