The Soulpass Project

I have stripped almost all of the CSS… The reason is that the layout before was not my own work, and I want this to be my own work. So, I’ll be playing around with the CSS and trying to get it to look okay.

Happy day!! So I installed the Exhibit photo gallery plugin on here… Owen Winkler, the author of the plugin, came and posted comments on this very website! I feel as if I went to a showing of Kill Bill or something and Tarantino just signed my back! … or maybe… mmm… something like that… hah… *sigh*

I hope to one day be less pathetic.. hah

I’ve been working on a new layout for Soulpass. Consistent with my habit of testing things live, you may notice some weird changes every once in a while. The site may even break for a few minutes at a time. Special thanks to Mary E. Johnson for the header photo! It was taken on a trip to New York for New Years. She has a totally sweet camera, check out her website!

I’ve decided to go with Exhibit for a photo gallery. I ran into a serious problem with it, so I will post the problem and remedy right here, and hopefully it will help someone else. Since I had made a few posts in the Exhibit section of the WordPress support forums, I’ll just paste the posts that I made on here. Also, I’m going to use this post to test and see if it’s really working

Post One:
i have Exhibit 1.1d, and WordPress 1.5-gamma 2005-02-08. Exhibit is not working …. Does it not work with 1.5 yet? Here are other plugins that I have installed and activated: Adhesive 2.1 beta, Countdown 1.0 alpha 5, EzStatic 1.9, Hello Dolly 1.0, Spam Karma 1.18 alpha 3, WP-CC 0.1.1, and WP Plugin Manager 1.6.4.b. I have followed the installation instructions, and Exhibit is activated in the plugin list; However, there is no Exhibit section in the edit post, write post, edit draft, or anywhere. I did notice that when I browse to a comments page for a post in my WordPress, I get a mySQL error:

WordPress database error: [Table ‘example_com.wp_exhibit’ doesn’t exist]
SELECT ID FROM wp_exhibit WHERE post_ID = 11 and preview = 1 ORDER BY picorder;

Warning: array_chunk() expects parameter 1 to be array, null given in /home/ .dir/ myusername/ example.com/ wp-content/ plugins/ exhibitimg/ exhibit10p.php on line 475

I have changed the name of my domain, but that’s the error. So the table does not exist, but there is no Exhibit section in the modify post area that lets me create it. Perhaps I could create it manually knowing the structure, but it’s supposed to be in the admin area so something must be amiss. So, I disable the plugin to get rid of the error… Any idea how to fix this, or is it a matter of WP1.5 incompatibility??

Post Two:
From other posts in here, it appears that Exhibit is compatible with 1.5… I tried disabling all other plugins, still no dice…. I have manually added the Exhibit table in the mySQL database, including the “picorder” column, still no dice…. Adding the table did, however, get rid of the mySQL error in the comments page, so at least now I can keep Exhibit enabled without worrying about errors. I have tried going to Manage Posts and editing a post, the Exhibit section is not there. I’ve tried starting a new post, clicking “save and continue editing,” and it’s still not there. I have tried downloading “asy_exhibit.zip,” and that didn’t work so I put the “exhibit11d.zip” files back up. I’d really like for this to work, as it seems like a really neat and fitting plugin… Any suggestions??

Post Three:
IMPORTANT …. i’ve fixed the problem…. the problem was that PHP was in CGI mode rather than apache module mode …. i found that suggestion in a little post on here somewhere, but i feel like it’s important to know …. luckily, i have the best hosting provider on the planet. i logged in and changed it to apache module mode with a few clicks. the provider recommends CGI mode for greater security, but they list some drawbacks of it in their knowledge base:

• Custom 404 pages won’t work for .php files with PHP-CGI. Or will they? See n74’s comment below!
• Variables in the URL won’t work without using mod_rewrite (example.com/blah.php/username/info/variable).
• Custom php directives in .htaccess files (php_include_dir /home/user;/home/user/example_dir) won’t work.
• The $_SERVER[’SCRIPT_NAME’] variable will return the php.cgi binary rather than the name of your script

After much blood, sweat, and headaches I have gotten MicroWiki to use search engine friendly URLs. The MicroWiki site describes a way to do it with ISAPI, and I quickly found out that the method does not work with Apache mod_rewrite. Well, I wasn’t about to have query strings in my MicroWiki implementation, so I set out on a mission to get the job done myself. It shouldn’t have been as much of a headache as it was, but I am making great progress. I have saved the MicroWiki-specific code in my .htaccess to a text file.

Click here to see the .htaccess code…

I really hope that someone else will be able to use this, let me know if you do! There is one limitation, and it won’t make any difference unless your visiters manually mess around with the URL. It doesn’t work correctly with a trailing slash (yet). So, as of now, the URL “/_wiki/index” produces different results than “/_wiki/index/”. Don’t worry, I won’t stand for this. I’ll be trying to fix it as soon as possible. If any of you mod_rewrite experts out there know of a way to fix it, or of a better way to do the whole thing, don’t hesitate to leave some feedback! During the process of getting this to work, I kind of broke the site for a few hours :); everything should be in working order now, and hopefully I’ll be providing a link to the shiney new Soulpass Wiki very soon!

So I’ve been working on integrating Gallery into WordPress, and it has turned out to be a lot less that easy. At first I installed RumGallery, and it was working. Meh, but I couldn’t settle for it. After all, I knew that I eventually wanted to be able to read EXIF data from JPEGs, and Gallery seemed to be accepted as a really great… gallery. It turns out that even though it comes with support for quite a few CMSs, WordPress isn’t one of them. Looking through Gallery’s source, I have found that it just won’t be possible to integrate it directly into WordPress. I want to be able to use my WordPress layout dynamically, and I want it to integrate seamlessly. When I create a theme for WordPress, I don’t want to have to re-hack Gallery. Parts of the HTML layout and style inclusion are hardcoded into multiple pages in Gallery. Therefore, it will not be feasable to try and get it to work. I have already gotten it to look somewhat like this WordPress theme, but since it’s not tightly integrated I’m simply not going to use it. Also, it isn’t perfect and there’s no sense in spending so much time to get it right when I can look at other, more customizable options. You can see my attempt at it here. Right now I’m thinking the best solution is to go back to RumGallery and add the EXIF extraction features myself… *sigh*

Well, soulpass.com is finally alive… I’ve decided to go with WordPress rather than writing my own system. It may take me a while to get used to how this works, so bear with me. Things are coming together, I hope to have an image gallery up soon. So far WordPress is not too disappointing. I have upgraded to Beta 1.5 for some added functionality. Let’s hope it holds up….