When software doesn’t work

I’m an enthusiastic user of the current iteration of WordPress, but that doesn’t mean I don’t need to take a stick to the software for errant behavior. Annoying Trait Number One concerns the autosave feature for writing posts, which sounds like a great idea in theory. In practice, it’s meant that my admin is littered with unwanted drafts. Even more irritating has been a weird occasional hiccup that causes WordPress to ignore my attempts to manually save posts. I finally lost enough patience to do something about it. An admittedly inelegant fix, thoughtfully provided by ImJustCreative in the WP support forums, suggests editing the time values in autosave.js to “some silly high number.” Thought about that, then decided to adopt his secondary suggestion and just delete autosave.js altogether. Seems to work, though I’ll keep an eye on WP’s behavior in this regard.

Another problem with WordPress 2.5.x has been the inconsistent performance of the Flash-based image uploader. A lot of work by testers went into getting the uploader to work with the various server settings employed by users. I ultimately found that it worked reliably with Firefox 2 for the Mac…and with nothing else. Now that I’ve upgraded to Firefox 3, the Flash uploader doesn’t work anywhere. Enough of this. I sought and found a solution in the No Flash Uploader plugin by Dion Hulse. Uploaded it, activated it, and bam! The normal, non-Flash, boringly-effective image uploader is back in use. Things will stay this way until I get word that the Flash thingummy works across the board.

As usual, even when WordPress doesn’t “just work,” workarounds and alternatives abound for the diligent searcher. Again, I guess it’s just that open source magic that Matt Mullenweg talks about. I have become a believer.

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