IE7

ChazzLayne.com has been plagued by an intermittent error that on IE7 causes the page to vanish, and on IE8 causes it to stop loading wherever the error occurs (usually resulting in half the content and the entire sidebar disappearing). “Details” on this error, vague as usual, can be found here: KB927917.

The Snowball

I had time to do a little digging today, and through the WordPress.org plug-in repository was able to track the problem down to the beloved Flickr Tag (a better WP-to-Flickr plug-in there exists not!), but fortunately the trail didn’t end there. A comment mentioned there being a problem with Lightbox, and that disabling Flickr Tag’s Lightbox setting would fix the problem. Sure enough that worked, so naturally I set about to fixing Lightbox.

I started at the beginning – thinking that the copy of Lightbox included with the aging-but-trustworthy Flickr Tag must simply be out of date I set the plug-in to simply output Lightbox-ready HTML, then installed the latest version of Lightbox on my site. Feeling victorious I opened up IE and pointed the browser to a Flickr-heavy page on my site only to watch the whole thing simply go *poof*, just as it always had. Of course, the support forums at Lightbox proved to be little help. The only reference to the problem was a thread where someone got close to the answer, but mistakenly blamed the problem on a conflict with a Twitter plug-in and considered the case closed. It was then I realized the out-of-date Lightbox package included with Flickr Tag also included yet another out-of-date package: Scriptaculous.

The Cure

Sure enough, included in the latest newest bestest downloadable package of Lightbox 2.04 is an out-of-date copy of Scriptaculous that triggers the KB927917 bug whenever you look at it wrong. With Scriptaculous 1.8.3 installed, I can now enjoy my favorite, unsupported Flickr Tag plug-in for WordPress – a plug-in which still works flawless despite no updates having been released since WP 2.7. If only everyone wrote code this well…