For part two of “My Journey to WordPress” I’m going to talk about setup and configuration. I mentioned that my host does a simplified installation of both wordpress and gallery. It made the first part of this really, really easy. I literally, log into my administration web-panel, then click install.

After about 5-10 minutes I had emails in my inbox letting me know that the software was up and running. Excellent! I logged into wordpress, and it was setup in no time flat, gallery was a little more cumbersome, but still quite simple to setup really.

With the gallery setup, a few of the plugins needed additional configuration so they didn’t work right out of the box. But that was no big deal. Now that gallery and wordpress were both independently working, it was time to hook them together and then pass off the site.

To install the WPG2 plugin, just download, unzip, ftp/ssh/sftp/whatever the files over to your wordpress plugins directory. After installing, enable the plugin then head over the to the WPG2 tab in the admin interface.

General configuration of the WPG2 was pretty straight forward. The URL rewrites section gave me a little bit of trouble, so make sure to enable and disable it in Gallery first. Then try it in WPG2. You’ll also need to download two additional Gallery plugins per the WPG2 docs. That process was very straightforward in the Gallery admin panel, click on plugins then the second tab , download, activate, enjoy.

Now the trouble begins…

I had this great setup all ready to go, Gallery 2 integrated with wordpress! It was perfect. I clicked on the WPG2 page and saw this horrible theme that didn’t fit into wordpress at all! Uh-oh

I figured that I must have missed something. Being the a developer type, and a guy, I didn’t bother to read the instructions, I just stared clicking and watching the error messages. So I figured, what the heck, let’s see what the docs have to say. A quick google for WPG2 takes me to the old plugin homepage, put luckily there was a link to the “new” homepage via wordpress.org. On the homepage I see a quickstart guide – perfect! Or not…

The quickstart said to to exactly what I did! I’ve got wordpress and gallery integrated, heck I can even use the snazzy gallery picker while writing my articles… but the page looks horrible!

I figure that it must be a theme thing or something, so now it is time to go and figure that one out. Back to google. I did a quick search for “wpg2 wordpress theme” and came up with a few interesting hits.

• The first a site with a bunch of modified wordpress themes that are “optimized” for gallery… I have no idea what that means, it wasn’t in the quickstart… I didn’t realize you needed to optimize for this integration… Bookmark it, comeback later.
• Next, that old help forum… it rules in the google search so be careful! Just a bunch of php nonsense. I don’t know php – and I don’t want to know it! That is what I loved about textpattern… wordpress is beginning to piss me off.
• Next, another site from the old forum… Didn’t they move all of this stuff?!!? Wait!! Something that might be useful!
  

Before you begin

• – if you need to modify the header.php file of the WordPress theme to suite your needs, try to do this before proceeding
  - it’s recommended that you use a Gallery2 theme which is optimized for WordPress integration, like the WordPressEmbedded Gallery2 Theme for Gallery 2.1 or the WordPress Gallery2 Theme for Gallery 2.0.x.

Aha! There is some sort of wordpress embdeded Gallery 2 theme. That makes sense… Since I’m using a version of Gallery 2 that is above 2.1 that might just be the ticket. Download, install.

Okay, so now gallery has a new theme. It’s pretty boring, but what the heck, I haven’t seen it in wordpress yet. That site at the Gallery 2 old forum mentioned something about the header.php file… Whatever, lets see what we get

Not good… Okay, so it’s not totally plug and play. This is becoming painfully obvious. And what happened to the quick start, this isn’t feeling so quick now!

Stop! I’m working on my friends site… this isn’t going to work. The site looks like crap, I’m hacking a live version and this just isn’t good… Detour. Reset my development instance of ryanbarr.com. Install of the the files from my host, re-configure and walk through the steps I’ve taken so far… a while later… Resume, on my development instance of my personal site.

Now you see how I got roped into this whole mess… Since I’m already working on it to figure it all out…

Next step, lets try hooking into the “bookmarked” link I found earlier. I download a few of the “optimized” themes, activate and suddenly all is well in the world. The blog, and the gallery are working perfectly together – but why? I realize that I have no idea why this is suddenly working, the quick start guide wasn’t so quick and now I’m lost. Okay, time to read some more.

Back to the official homepage of the plugin. Under WPG2 Operations I finally find a few pieces of what I’m looking for. But it is sparse to and sort of fragmented. Again, no mention of this elusive Gallery 2 theme I found while googling, the only thing close was a page that was “under construction,” it linked back to the place I found my Galley 2 theme… So I guess if you look hard enough it is there, not not obvious.

Well, At this point I’m still a little lost, and don’t really have any desire to learn php (I do happen to know about 13 other programming/scripting languages, so i guess another one can’t hurt). What I really want it a customizable theme that doesn’t require me to re-do all of the work I just did in textpattern!

The support forums… Lets see, click, click, click, there we go… Found them! The support forums are located here. There are three options, if your looking for help with themes etc… go to WPG2 CSS/Layout Support. Don’t bother with the other areas, they will help if you have other integration issues

The forums are excellent! The guys that work the plugins seem to have answered all of the questions quickly and I was able to find what I needed… My theme vSlider3 this particular theme seemed to have it all. Customization, integration into gallery, options, configuration, no php required! Download, install!

Why didn’t I start at the support forums… Oh yeah, they are buried in the google results! That will work itself out with time…

Now I’ve installed vSlider3 and have a working site! Excellent!

Okay… now that this is all working, lets see about getting all of our content back into wordpress like it was in textpattern. Off to the admin panel, manage -> import -> textpattern -> oh crap.

In my next installment… Read about the joys of importing data from textpattern, and what I did about sections… What do you mean wordpress doesn’t have sections?!?!?!