WordPress and Course Registration Upgrade

I recently upgraded my WordPress to 3.3, and also applied the latest version of the course registration plugin.

…And I have had some subtle problems with both of them. I’m not going to have time to work on either problem until later this week. I’ve managed to schedule my December so solidly that I occasionally have to duck to avoid running into myself on the way back.

The problem I’m having with WP 3.3 is that the search widget no longer works properly. I have temporarily removed it, and I’m looking for a better way to implement search. I’ve heard there may be a Google search plugin that can be tailored to do what I want, so I will be evaluating plugins for that later this week.

I’m seeing at least two problems with the course registration plugin. The database appears to have some funky characters in it, which should be easy enough to fix when I get some time. It also looks like I’m going to have to go in and set up my notifications again. The prior version didn’t have the right behavior either, so I did some modifications to the source code to get it to do what I wanted. The upgrade wiped my changes out, and since the upgrade was a fairly major re-write, the code for that isn’t where it was before. Again, as soon as I have the time, I will be looking through the code to see where I have to modify things.

Since I’m studying the innards of WordPress, and slowly becoming proficient at programming in PHP, I will probably be doing some experimentation over the holidays. I’ve already discovered that there are some ways to implement changes to the theme that won’t get wiped out by updates, and I think there might be some way to do the same for plugins.

As it turns out, I have a couple of days of vacation that I wasn’t planning to take, but I belatedly discovered that at my new job, there is no vacation carry-over. It’s “use it or lose it.” I’m glad to say that my supervisor is on top of things there, and notified me of the problem when he reviewed my Christmas break schedule. Unfortunately, that discovery came too late to schedule any more CHL classes, so the regular schedule will resume in January, with CHL on the 2nd Saturday of each month, and NRA classes on the 1st Sunday of alternate months. I already know of one conflict (in May) that may preclude a CHL class that month, but otherwise, that’s the plan.

If there are any WP-savvy readers out there, I would definitely appreciate any suggestions you might have. Either leave a comment, use the comment form, or send me an email. Even if you aren’t WP-savvy, if you see something that doesn’t work quite right, let me know. Thanks in advance!

Update, December 18th, 2011: I re-installed the search widget, and added a plugin that does look-ahead. Not sure what actually fixed the search problem, but search does appear to be working correctly now, and the look-ahead drop-down box is kinda neat. I had a little bit of unexpected free time drop in my lap, so the next item up is to look in the class registration code to change the way it handles notifications. Oh, and fix that bad database entry.