Sure, letting the folks over at WordPress maintain the underlying code-base would be a nice thing.  Sure, it might make it easier for people to log in to leave comments or read “member only” material (both of which I used to have on this site*).  But it takes away freedom from me by their limitations they have imposed — particularly the lack of plugins bit.

Wasn’t the whole point of WordPress to allow third party developers to extend the base software?  (No, really, I’m asking.  I think it was, but I’m not sure.)  So… using a limited base install of the software (what used to be known as “cripple-ware” before the web became big) just isn’t for me.  If it is for you, more power to ya.

* I had originally intended to expand the number of posts in the “Member Only” area that I had on this site, but I’ve learned a couple of things.  One:  Very few people actually honestly care about what I have to say.  Two:  Those few people who do visit my site are of similar types as myself and don’t want to have to register on a bazillion different sites — even if they know the person.  Hell… I hate it when I have to register on some site just to download a Joomla component or plugin.  Wait.  I hated it when I had to register on wordpress.org in order to report a bug on a plugin.  But I did.  Why?  It’s a fact of life.  Yet, I can understand when someone doesn’t want to register on here — after all, I don’t post all that much — so I’ve removed the “Member Access” plugin I was using and removed the (albeit unintentionally turned on) restriction to comments to only those registered users.

The plugin gives a page, rather poorly laid out if you ask me, but a page nonetheless that allows you to select at the user and category level who has access to what categories.  Why “poorly”?  Imagine a grid with categories along the top, users down the side, and checkboxes at the intersections and you’ll have exactly how that page was laid out.  Now, this isn’t a bad thing if you don’t have that many categories, but do have lots of users.  But if you have lots of categories, then it’ll wind up with you scrolling horizontally — and that is never a good idea for a web page.

But, that’s just a design issue… and all of us web designers are different, and have different ideas of what is the “right” way to do something.

The reason that I’ve uninstalled this plugin (and temporarily moved all the posts I’m hiding to “draft” status until I can figure out a better solution) is that every time I added a new category, I’d forget that I had to go down to a different section of the admin interface and enable the admin user (me) to have access to that new category.  I’m sorry, but shouldn’t the admin have access to every category on the blog they’re administering?  Oh, and shouldn’t something that adds access permissions to a category enhance or extend the Categories page?  Or at the very least, stick it’s config page in the Posts section?  Hmmm?  Ya think?

So… I’m back to the drawing board, wondering why I had switched from Joomla — which actually has user access levels built-in — to WordPress.  Oh yeah… Joomla sucks as a blogging tool… but that’ll have to wait for another review.

The custom field ‘views’ is used by the WP-PostViews plugin to keep track of how many times a post has been viewed.  This was desired, however unnecessary since Google Analytics is doing that nicely for me.  The undesired side-effect was that as the number of posts went up, the number of those duplicate fields would also increase.

These fields, mind you, were not stored in the database once I saved a post.  Nope.  They only existed when I created a new post.  The problem with having 1000+ of these, was that my browser would literally lock up while that the “New Post” page loaded.

Since I didn’t need that functionality inside my WordPress install, I disabled and completely deleted the plugin, but that didn’t fix the problem.

So I logged into my database (using phpMyAdmin or something similar) and after a quick bit of looking determined that the number of duplicate fields matched the number of ‘view’ fields whose value was ’1′.  Apparently the fields whose number was not ’1′ didn’t produce a duplicate on the new post page.

select count(*)
  from wp_postmeta
 where meta_key = 'views'
   and meta_value = '1'

Now, if I had intended to, at some point, revive that plugin on my blog; or if I wanted to keep the existing data; I wouldn’t do this next step exactly this way… I’d keep the “and meta_value = '1'” part of the previous query.  But since I didn’t, and since I’d already removed the plugin, I simply cleaned up the database.

delete
  from wp_postmeta
 where meta_key = 'views'

There. No more duplicate fields on the New Post page. It loads so much quicker now.

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).