Having been feeling under the weather recently, and not out on my bike, I took the opportunity to do some spring mid summer cleaning of this site.

I needed to update to the latest version of WordPress (2.2.2), and I wanted to change to a different gallery system. With these two significant changes I would also need to seriously update the theme.

To (hopefully) ensure future compatibility I dumped the old theme, and went for the Sandbox theme. It has a rich semantic markup and profusion of classes, dynamically generated by a few functions, so it now means that all of the ugly hacks I was using before can be (mostly) completed with a few lines of code in the CSS file.

The new features of WordPress 2.2.2 were a welcome addition, but the major change is moving to using NextGEN Gallery by Alex Rabe. I am halfway there at the moment – all of the galleries are now NextGEN, and so are all of the images within posts. I have documented the procedures which I used.

The other significant change was to change to using WP PTViewer to display panoramas. Which means I now have an effective way of displaying partial / incomplete panoramas…

I think this picture of the Chinese Pagola at RHS Garden Wisley works particularly well as you get a really good sense of standing close to it looking up at the roof.

I have stopped using a number of plugins, and started using a couple more – all are detailed on a new Tech/WP page here.