Famous last words could be added to that title — “…for the last time…”. When I upgraded and revamped my whole site awhile ago, and converted everything over to the latest version of WordPress which includes blocks, one of the pieces that I left unresolved was what to do about the gallery layout for my photo gallery. Thousands of photos are in the database and on the site, and I’m not editing any of those.

No, what was on the block for possible editing was the actual pages for individual galleries. I’ve been slowly converting from an old site running Piwigo over to WordPress anyway. The old site had 2005-2013 or so; the new site conversion had made it through 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 (general), and most of my wedding photos (with the honeymoon still outstanding). A huge whack of files to be sure, but again, only about 12-15 gallery pages per year for 4 years. Call it 50-60 pages.

The problem is that the new site config did not work very well with my old pages (the first 50-60). I had dumped a specific video plugin that wasn’t loading consistently correctly, and I wasn’t even sure I liked the various layouts and colours for the pages. Not to mention that there’s an upgrade to the individual galleries themselves to make them more WordPress v5.5 compatible.

The “right” solution is to bite the bullet, fix the 50 pages and move on. And since I truly mean for this to be the last time I go back and revamp any design stuff, at least not by myself (I could pay someone someday, I suppose, if I did a major overhaul), I want it done right.

So while I run the site and do all the work for the photo gallery, I like to pretend that I am sharing it with my wife and son. Which means — lucky wife that she is — she gets to have views on the layout and how it looks for those pages.

I did a quick layout, sent it to her about 3 weeks ago, and silence. She was busy at the time, forgot about it, finally remembered it and sent me views about a week ago. Today, I took the time to go back, open a page, review her comments (bigger, more prominent prose) and make the changes. I then tested it on a couple of pages, designed a reusable block so that I can make all the pages look the same going forward, found an easy way to make a tweak to an existing layout so I don’t have to reset a whole bunch of stuff, and saved it. Andrea approved, I’m ready for future production.

One page down, 50+ to go. I’ve also figured out a way to correct a bunch of other photo issues I was having, so even the workflow is improved. Nice.

Today I choose to revise my gallery layout, ready for replication for other months / galleries.

What choices are you making today?