In case you really care, here's what happened. You know I love my smileys. Well, I use a third party editor in my weblog. Because it does lots more than just the regular editor. You know in some forums you can click on buttons and make words into links and upload images and make fonts different kinds and different sizes and different colors with ease. Well, the software I use for my weblog I got a long, long time ago, it came with my website control panel. The first version was free. The upgrades offered more options, but they weren't free. I was hooked at how easy it was to do the weblog. When I first started back in 1997, I hand coded everything which was very time consuming. This software made it much easier. I bought each upgrade and was happy.
The last upgrade I did (back at the beginning of this year) to this software, well, things went missing. Some things that worked in previous versions didn't and wouldn't work in the newest version. The things that made special formatting easy were gone. Some were there, but most were not. My smileys were there, but there was enough stuff that wasn't, that I went in search of another rich text editor that had what I wanted. I found one in Wygwam. And that worked nicely, until they upgraded and no longer included smileys. Because they were silly, serious webloggers did not use smileys. So, I stayed with the first version of their software that I had. Because of the smileys.
I've got a thing for smileys. I love my smileys.
Well, Wygwam is based on another free editor, CKEditor. And what they did was incorporate CKEditor into their software, which was designed to run with Expression Engine. And as plugins are added to CKEditor by users (some are free, some you have to pay for), it was "possible" to incorporate those into Wygwam. And I found earlier this week that someone had made a free plugin for smileys! And I added it. Or, I tried to add it. I had to make a new file with new code in it and upload it and set paths and upload something else there and let me tell you, it was no fun at all. I spent hours trying to get my smileys working with no positive results. I put in a support request with the Wygwam developers (fyi, I think the name Wygwam is loosely based on the WYSIWIG (What You See Is What You Get) editors) and they couldn't get the smiley plugin to work. Frustrated, I went in search of another editor. And I found one.
Expresso, which also is based on CKEditor. It's more up to date and the CKEditor plugins area snap to install. And I got my smileys back. And once again, all was good.
Until.
Until I decided to upgrade the original software. I'm using version 2.5.5. The latest version is 2.9.2. I saved my SQL database (the thing that wasn't saved at the end of last year, where I lost ALL of my entries trying to get something new to work - I still haven't gone through and formatted all of the so they look right). I tried installing newer versions, one at a time. And I kept getting error messages. Finally, last night I said screw it, I'll start from scratch. Fortunately, I save old files, I don't delete them as I get new ones. And I deleted EVERYTHING that had to do with this weblog (except the database) on my server. And this morning, I started over. I started from scratch.
And I installed 2.5.5. And I installed my third-party plugins (Wygwam, even though I don't plan on using it and Expresso with all of the additional plugins that went with that). When it appeared everything was there, I restored the old database.
And I'm back in business. No error messages, no problems.
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