There is Capital-D Drama in the WordPress world.
It would take too long to explain all the nuances. Basically, founder Matt Mullenweg is Big Mad that he tried to shake down a rival and failed, and his resulting temper tantrum is damaging the WordPress ecosystem to the point where the best thing might be for Mullenweg to leave WordPress entirely.
Damn, and I remember the days when WordPress used to be fun. When there were annual official Christmas blog themes (I used this one) and wallpapers. (2014 seems to be the last for this holiday tradition.)
I drifted away. The Gutenberg block editor, a clunky WYSIWYG editor, wasn’t my cup of tea—give me raw HTML code, written in Notepad or Xed!—and it felt like the project was orienting more around business needs than writerly needs. And, social media filled the niche that blogging had, plus social media involved less thought… and less craft. There would be flares of activity from time to time—early COVID—but, honestly, I was tired. My day job takes a lot out of me. Before COVID, it was 90, 95 thousand words of work on the catalog. In 2020, it dipped down to the 60 thousand range, which was great because I had the mental space to write fiction again, but that didn’t last. In recent months, my monthly word count has topped 120,000 words. Monthly.
That’s not to say no non-catalog writing didn’t happen. Last year, I wrote a manual for work. This year, I wrote and submitted a short story, and I have a pile of notecards with notes and plot ideas for others. I’m not completely bereft.
That said. Back to WordPress.
The Capital-D Drama led me to dust off the cobwebs of my WordPress site. Hence, some recent posts. (One wasn’t even about a Linux topic!) They will may be more.
(I feel Linux supplanted WordPress as my go-to tech hobby, but solving the work connection problem two years ago made it a viable working environment for me, so I’ve been discovering things and doing things I’m kinda proud of ever since.)
One of the things I dusted off was a landing page.
In early 2022 I decided to do a website refresh. The underlying layout, a WordPress theme called Alves, I think is fine. Maybe a little dated—it was released back in the summer of 2019—but fine.
After rehabbing one of Sony’s official Spider-Man 3 WordPress themes—yes, Virginia, there were official Spider-Man 3 WordPress themes—to make it responsive and update it for Spider-Man: No Way Home, I went to work on coding a new landing page. Working on it over a period of a few weeks, on January 22, 2022, it was done. I learned how to code a custom comment form, I did some wild things with post loops, it integrated some jquery stuff. It looked sharp.
I never did a thing with it.
Yesterday, I took a fresh look at it.
It didn’t work.
Well, it sort of worked. The stuff with the loops worked. The comment form? Worked exactly as it should.
The featured images? Nope. In 2022 I had images. In 2024, I had broken images showing alt text.
Looking at the page source, it looked like the WordPress tags to pull the featured images were broken.
For the life of me, I could not figure out why. Featured images were working on the landing page that worked. Why weren’t they working now on the page I’d developed? I spent hours, four, maybe five, digging into this. Was the_post_thumbnail_url tag broken or deprecated? What would I get if I echoed has_post_thumbnail? (Nothing. It returned false.) What if I attached a new featured image? Again, nothing.
I started deactivating plugins.
When I deactivated Jetpack, a Swiss Army Knife of a plugin by Automattic, and reloaded the new landing page, I had images. When I reactivated Jetpack, no images. When I deactivated Jetpack, images again.
The problem, clearly, was Jetpack.
I installed a plugin that deactivated Jetpack modules, thinking that one of the modules, maybe Photon, which works with images, was interferring, but deactivating Photon, even deactivating all the Jetpack modules, still left me without images.
If I must go without Jetpack, then I shall. I didn’t use it for much — statistics, sharing buttons, related posts. The Jetpack code is bigger than WordPress itself, so that’s a ton of bloat for three functions. I may explore other options. It’s not worth it to me to figure out why Jetpack was causing featured images to break in the custom loops. And worse, if featured images break in the new landing page’s loops, what’s to say they won’t break in my current landing page?
I remain undecided about the new landing page. But I do need to update my static pages; some of that content is old. Like, really old. And that’s something to work on in the days and weeks ahead.
The Capital-D WordPress drama is amusing. Five hours debugging code that I know worked when the problem was something unrelated was anything but.