This classic line from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (one of my favorite films) is from a bewildered Han Solo as he was trying to get the Millenium Falcon to jump to hyperspace to escape the Empire. It is highly symbolic of some website issues I’ve been having for the past few weeks. If you can picture a highly frustrated Solo flipping all sorts of switches and pounding the side of the Falcon cockpit in an attempt to get it to act as it should, that’s what it’s been like. It is perhaps a relatable story for anyone running a site with WordPress and a variety of plugins. While I am certainly guilty of tweaking things to a point where I break them, this one clearly fell into the sabotage by the evil Empire category.
The frustration with debugging problems in WordPress is often related to not knowing quite where to look for them, especially if you rely on a number of plugins from independent developers. Is it happening because of WordPress, a plugin, my host, at Cloudflare, within my local browser, etc? It takes a considerable amount of time to sort through all of this when it is a site-wide issue. I was having an intermittent issue of the notification of updates being available for certain plugins appearing, then update notice disappearing before I had a chance to do the update. Very, very weird. Not a catastrophic issue, but enough to be highly annoying.
Fortunately, all of this was happening on the admin side of my site, and any visitors may have just noticed certain features disappearing (like subscribing to comments, etc) while I was pounding and flipping switches. Searches of people having similar problems usually traced back to a problematic plugin, except I wasn’t using any of them with known issues. And typically any tech support usually defaults to saying “deactivate all plugins” and go through one by one. Some even suggest going back to the basic WordPress theme, which is very difficult to do on a live site without completely disrupting a visitor experience.
I did attempt to do some of the plugin deactivations, removals, and reactivations except for those that are critical to my site functionality. Occasionally the problem would appear to be solved and then come right back. I reinstalled WordPress a few times which seemed to help, only to return again. It was almost like something was mixing up cached versions of the site and displaying them to me at random. Turning all caching off demonstrated it wasn’t the root cause. Eventually, I spent so much time trying to figure this out I just put it on hold in figuring out.
The Sith Revealed
I started manually looking through some changelogs and guess what showed up in the changelog for NextGen Gallery Pro yesterday.
* Fixed: When NextGEN Pro has updates available WordPress will not show any other plugins available updates
NextGEN Gallery Pro version 3.8.0
I never deactivated my galleries for any significant length of time because it would wreck a large portion of my site. And it seems the Empire was lurking there all this time. And their changelog appears to be inaccurate because this problem didn’t occur only when “NextGEN Pro has updates available” – it’s been a problem apparently since the last updates in July. I installed this new version and then all of the sudden, a lot of other plugin updates started showing up. Not my fault indeed.
Beyond the time I wasted trying to figure this out is the fact this isn’t a one-time thing with Imagely. As a user of NextGen Gallery since 2018, I’ve had my share of frustrations with bugs and other issues. I know they are a very small company with limited resources, but one of their key issues seems to be in the quality control and testing of their updates. However, rigorous processes can be established no matter the size of your team. For the longest time, they even had the wrong year for their updates being released which shows a lack of attention to detail. It’s sloppy. Since NextGen was sold last year to the company that runs Envira galleries, I can only hope the new owners have some plans for improvement in this area. There is a lot of competition in the photography gallery space, and sloppy updates don’t help.
I am still using NextGen to run the galleries of my site because I have invested A LOT of time in tweaking and getting them to look how I want. I dread the thought of having to convert to something else. It is quite flexible in creating a lot of options for selling prints, even though it takes doing some custom CSS to tweak some of the appearances. It integrates well with Lightroom where I don’t even need to visit my website to add new images to each gallery. Generally, it still works pretty well and fulfills my needs at a reasonable price. This particular bug, while highly annoying because I couldn’t figure out what was going on, only impacted me on the admin side of my site. There are other bugs that are taking a very long time to fix, but I’ve been living with them.
I suppose all of this just goes with the territory of running your own site with WordPress and a lot of independent plugins that don’t always play nice together or work as they should on their own. And I understand it is impossible to test every possible configuration that exists in WordPress, but in this case, it wasn’t a conflict. Thanks for bearing with this little rant and any inconsistencies you may have seen.
It wasn’t my fault and it wasn’t Han Solo’s either.
Hi Mark,
We at Imagely sincerely apologize that you were caught with his bug. It was definitely an odd one and I’m glad we were able to get it fixed as soon as we became aware of it. Regarding QA though, we actually put a lot of effort into QA. The problem is, as you said, with WordPress, there is an infinite number of variables. Many times an issue can be a combination of things, which might include the server’s OS and even its version number. Or it could be the PHP version, or available RAM, or having XYZ plugin installed alongside another plugin. So while QA is done prior to every update, there is no way to test for every potential variable. But we do what we can 🙂
With that said – thank you for sharing your thoughts, and for your patience as we fixed it. We completely empathize with you and the rest of the customers who experienced this issue. For what it’s worth, we wound up experiencing it too on the Imagely site. I too was going nuts figuring trying to figure out what was happening. When I brought it up with the team, I was told it’s already a ticket being worked on. So there you go. Cheers to a good weekend!
Hey Scott, Imperial troops are welcome here anytime. ? Thanks for the added insight. Even though I do understand the number of variables out there, once known, I do hope this is added to some type of checklist in QA for testing as a lesson-learned.
I assume a few words of profanity accompanied your pounding and flipping switches. ?
a few WTFs of coursr
Tech can be infuriating. It ought to just work (but rarely does)!
yes it can Howard, yes it can
I may have seen signs of this bug as well, Mark. The dashboard would say there was X number of updates, but there would be nothing when I went to the update panel. But my attention was somewhere else, so I put it all on the back burner and then it seemed to disappear with the recent NextGen Pro update. There may be some benefit to those who procrastinate! lol ?
I like that strategy Earl. Yeah, same thing was happening with me and it was driving me nuts. Next time I may just “get to it later.” 🙂
Haha, that’s some serious hair-pulling material! xD It must have been a relief to read the changelog notice. 😉
You have no idea. (well, you probably do) Would have been nice to see a little blog post or communication to their Pro users that they were “working on a fix if anyone was experiencing it.” Would have saved me a lot of grief for sure.