I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 3 and to whatever the latest version of Gallery 2 might be.

Both went “sort of” smoothly, though there was a bit of gear grinding to get the two to work together.

Oddly enough, once everything was properly set, I just had to be patient and various problems disappeared on their own. The linkage between WordPress and Gallery 2 works better than ever, though they seemed on the verge of divorce right after the upgrade.

I did the Gallery 2 upgrade first, and it went perfectly smoothly. Everything seemed to work just fine once I was finished. The last time I updated Gallery 2, I had to go back in and reset several things that upgrading had unset.

Fixing my updated WordPress theme

The only problem with Gallery 2, and the first thing I noticed in WordPress was that I’d lost my customized splash and logo photos. G2 normally puts its own logo in the upper left page corner, and I replaced it with a house photo. The splash on the top of Smatters (the same house repeated) was replaced with a bland green bar. Also, there was some weirdness in the layout such that the blog name and tag line (“Matters of the Smith Atwood family”) were superimposed over part of the margin and over the missing image.

I fiddled with the theme configuration (which claimed to display the house image, even while displaying the green bar) and then presto – the image appeared. The title and tag line were still askew, but I decided I’d just live with it for now.

Hooking up with G2

Then I went to look at G2 – and couldn’t reach it from Smatters. There’s a link in the top menu (the “Photos” link) that’s supposed to take you right to the gallery. It took me to an error page complaining that the WordPress G2 plugin had not been “validated.”

Sure enough, the G2 plugin had lost track of the G2 URL and directory path, a goofup during updating, I suppose. I fixed it, and slogged through all the other WP-G2 plugin settings, but the plugin still refused to locate the gallery.

I decided I’d just live with that for now. I renamed the “Photos” link to say “Broken G2” and added a separate one that led to a page that manually linked to the gallery. There was also a box on the left that provided a hierarchical search of the photo galleries: the box was empty, pending resolution of the plugin problems. I heaved a sigh, and hoped an upcoming patch would fix things.

Then I noticed that the Smatters heading had cleaned itself up: the title and tag lines appeared neatly at the top, outside of the house image. And – surprise – the G2 hierarchical search box was populated. And it worked – I could click on an album and hop inside.

So, without fixing anything at all, the blog formatting just fixed itself, and also healed its linkage to G2.

I went back and cleaned up the “Photos” link, and sure enough, everything was working.

Even better, G2 now seems to recognize when I’m logged in to WordPress, so I don’t have to log in twice.