Review: Simply Exclude plugin for WordPress

I had the WordPress plugin “Simply Exclude” installed both on here and on my JonWarrenPhotography.com site.  Until today I hadn’t really used it over on my photography site, since I only had the one category of posts there and therefore didn’t need to exclude anything.  However, I’ve recently started importing my Twitter feed there (like I’ve been doing here for a while) and wanted to exclude those posts from my main posts page (like I’ve been doing here successfully with Simply Exclude for a while).

No such luck.

For some bloody reason which I’m baffled by, but don’t feel like investigating further (I figure 30+ minutes is enough time for someone else’s F-up), Simply Exclude is just not saving my changes.  I go into the same page (on JonWarrenPhotography.com) that I did on MyHumbleAbode.com, make the same changes, hit “save”, and whereas I get the note saying the changes have been saved, when I check the blog they’re not saved and if I go back to that same page, the changes haven’t been saved.  WTF.

Version check.  Yep, both sites are running on the same hosting platform (e.g., DB, OS), both sites are using the same version of WordPress, and both sites had the same version of the Simply Exclude plugin installed.  No dice.

Manual DB intervention didn’t work, since the author’s using some sort of byte-offset to read the options — instead of creating a much more organized method of using a separate table or multiple options, everythings been dumped into one big ole string of text — which is highly annoying.  So copy-and-pasting the chunk of it that’s missing from one site’s DB to the other’s didn’t work.

Uninstall/Reinstall?  No such luck there either.  First off, it didn’t delete the DB entry during the uninstall process.  Secondly, it didn’t start saving stuff after I’d reinstalled it (and it recreated that options entry in the DB).

So, I’m done.  I’ll keep it installed on here (MyHumbleAbode.com) since it’s working (oh, and it’s still saving changes here, tested that too).  But over on JonWarrenPhotography.com, I’ve uninstalled it and am looking for another option.

(ha ha time) Since it’s written by someone named Paul Menard, perhaps he’s been too busy racing in NASCAR to fix the plugin.  (No, I seriously doubt that it’s the same person.)

Update:  I found an alternative that works, so I’m ditching Simply Exclude (SE) from both sites and going with Advanced Category Excluder (ACE).  The only drawback to this change, that I can see at the present, is that ACE doesn’t support tag-based exclusion and SE does.  But since all my Twitter feed posts are stuck into a separate category, I don’t need that functionality (at this time).