Recently I have learned a lot of lessons the hard way.

First of all, let me tell you right now that upgrading to WordPress 2.8 with a host still running PHP 4 is a bad idea. Nothing works quite right and media management, pictures at least, barely works at all. I thought I had broken it completely when I tried to reinstall the NextGen Gallery plugin, I couldn’t login to the admin site. I tried everything, including completely wiping out my WordPress files and reinstalling (I am running 3 WordPress sites and was having problems with all of them). I finally figured it had to have something to do with my host and found out how to force it to use PHP 5 (you have to add a line of code to the .htaccess file). Miracle of miracles, everthing suddenly worked!

I was so excited with NextGen Gallery and how well it seemed to work now that I was considering moving my whole site onto WordPress. I though I would start by adding all my images to my blog and start playing around with galleries and trying different ways of organizing them. There is a utility within NGG that allows you to import a whole folder of images. “How convenient”, I thought. I will just suck all my images from the neighbouring folder on my website and then I won’t have to bother with re-uploading everything. What I didn’t realize until tonight is that it doesn’t just copy those files, it MOVES THEM! So for the past three or four days my website has been almost completely devoid of pictures. Even my header was missing because I have white print against my banner image, the banner was gone and the writing was invisible. I still had my thumbnails because they are stored in a different folder, but that was it.

Oh well, live and learn. I worked so hard to build my website from scratch, even creating my own CMS, that I am loath to give it up. I think that perhaps I am not yet quite ready to put all my faith in WordPress.