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NextGEN Gallery plugin breaks itself when auto-updated
By braddock | April 29, 2008
NextGEN gallery is a great plugin for uploading photos and placing them as thumbnails or slideshows in your Wordpress posts and pages. When you combine it with the NextGEN-FlashViewer plugin you can create some awesome flash enabled picture galleries.
Here are some pics of my Golden Retriever Sally when she was 3 months old:
The Flash Player and a browser with Javascript support are needed..
When it comes time to update these really great plugins things go all pear-shaped though. The problem is both plugins want you to rename the folder they were zipped in when you upload them to wp-content/plugins/.
NextGEN Gallery wants to be in wp-content/plugins/nggallery/ and NextGEN-FlashViewer wants to be in wp-content/plugins/nggflashviewer/.
When you use the plugin auto-update function in Wordpress for both of these plugins everything seems to go fine. All is not well though. My posted galleries don’t show up anymore. The reason for this is that the plugins delete the current directory when you do the auto-update and then create a new folder with the freshly downloaded version of the plugin.
The new folders don’t have the right names though. NextGEN Gallery installs to wp-content/plugins/nextgen-gallery/ and NextGEN-FlashViewer creates wp-content/plugins/nextgen-flashviewer/ as its folder. This puts an end to your gallery goodness.
NextGEN Gallery expects imagerotator.swf to be in /nggallery/ and in order for NextGEN-FlashViewer to work it needs NextGEN Gallery in /nggallery/ as well. Everybody is looking in the wrong place.
NextGEN-FlashViewer presents a special problem. Since the flash animations it integrates with NextGEN Gallery are separate projects (Tilt View, Simple Viewer, Auto Viewer, and Post Card Viewer), you have to download them from several different web sites. When the auto-updater deletes and recreates the plugin’s folder those individual animations are deleted and you have to download them again and re-up them to /nggflashviewer/.
The simple fix is to FTP into wp-content/plugins/ and change the plugin’s folder names back to what they should be. Until of course the next update, when all this happens again. The guys behind both plugins are so dedicated to their projects that we seem to be getting 2 or 3 updates a week too.
If they just renamed the folders for the plugins in the zipped archives I think they could eliminate this problem. Even if things continue as is they are both well worth installing and fussing over when your have to update them. I can’t wait to see what new flash animations they integrate.
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Topics: Outside Time, WordPress |
