WP Shopping Cart (Ecommerce) plugin and WP 2.8 don’t mix
..but you’ll only have found out the hard way. Like I did. Probably the first time you came to drag-and-drop widgets after upgrading (reluctantly if you’re anything like me) to Wordpress 2.8.
I’ve ranted about the enslavement to upgrades that you’re forced into when you start blogging (or making sites) with Wordpress. No sooner than you get used to one version, some unknown entity decides its time to upgrade. If you don’t things gradually stop working on your site. Or your clients’ sites. But even if you do, things inevitably and suddenly don’t work too. Why? Because the people who make the free plugins you’re so dependent on haven’t caught up with the Wordpress upgrade. They either haven’t had time, or worse, can’t be bothered since no-one’s paying them to keep up.
With Wordpress, things go down like a line of dominoes. Just now, I noticed that the widget that comes with the WP AudioBoo plugin wasn’t showing on my homepage. So I replaced that plugin with a more recent one. Then I went to the widgets dashboard and tried to drag and drop the AudioBoo widget into my sidebar only to find I couldn’t. Further exploration revealed I couldn’t drag or drop anything. Ah. New problem.
Next step, Google and search for ‘can’t drag and drop widgets in WP’. That led me to a number of threads in the Wordpress Codex where people had upgraded to WP 2.8 only to find themselves unable to drag and drop widgets. 10 minutes later, I had worked out that it was the Ecommerce plugin from Instinct Entertainment (!) that was messing up the drag-and-drop function in WP 2.8.
A few people offered crude, temporary work-arounds. None of them solved the problem and all of them required a level of php expertise that would kill off all but the code-obsessed developer.
My solution? Lose the WP Shopping Cart plugin since I’m not really using it.
And where does that leave me? Stranded between WP Shopping Cart 2.5 and 3.7 and WP 2.8 and 2.8.2 with no real confidence that anything will ever work properly and a growing sense of the stupidity of the whole, idiotic endeavour.
I’ve really, really had enough running just to stay still. It’s insane – a modern madness that I want no further part of. There. I’ve said it. 
