Last night I upgraded my WithKnown installation from 0.7.5 to 0.7.7.1 and was shocked to see all of the social media integration of my instance had completely disappeared!
Suddenly POSSE wasn't POSS-I-ble!
Starting with 0.7.7, Known had taken out the old social media plugins and replaced them with Convoy. While I'm sure Convoy is awesome and makes social media integration for POSSE dead simple, something in my gut told me that it just wasn't for me. I also didn't want to throw away the hour or so I spent configuring all of the plugins in the first place only to end up paying $50 a year for the same thing I'd already had. Those who haven't dealt with it already, will probably find Convoy a great value, though it'd probably be better billed as a one-time fee rather than a recurring one.
I'll admit that I panicked for a while and contemplated restoring the original 0.7.5 server code from back-up.
Fortunately a cooler head prevailed and some research and internet searching began. I didn't find much immediately - the drawback of living so close to the bleeding edge of technology when still learning how all of it works.
I tried to see if I could uninstall the Convoy plugin by going into the site configurations and changing the plugin to disable it. Sadly, of the dozen or so plugins, Convoy is the only one that didn't ship with an "enable"/"disable" button. I'm sure they'll fix this shortly, but for those who want to do it manually, simply add the following line of code to your config.ini file:
antiplugins[] = 'Convoy'
Eventually, I spent some time digging into the code and comparing/contrasting all the files. Noticing that 0.7.6 had six or so additional folders for each of the social media plugins hiding within the IdnoPlugins folder (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, SoundCloud, etc.), I simply dragged and dropped all of those over into 0.7.7.1 and voila! We're back up and running.
As a fine point, one should notice that both the FourSquare and Twitter plugins have been updated since 0.7.6, so they should be copied and dragged over from the main GitHub repository. Following a similar procedure will also need to be watched/followed for future updates on occasion as well.
For future UX, I'm hoping that Known will at least as a minimum install and make Convoy available directly, but that disabling it will make the other original plugins viewable and configurable for the more technically minded, particularly as POSSE is one of the cornerstones of the IndieWeb movement.
As a quick recap for those doing general Known upgrades, try the following:
- Back up your database and your code, just in case;
- Download the new repository (either GitHub or on WithKnown);
- Delete the "dummy" Uploads folder from the new install and keep your original on the server which has all of your photos, etc.;
- Keep your config.ini;
- Keep your .htaccess (unless it needs a serious change; the htaccess.dist replacement file can be easily copied over, but will need to have its name changed from the version with the .dist extension);
- Keep the social media plugin folders in IdnoPlugins that you intend to continue using; or upload newer versions which are availble from ;
- Upload all the new files to the server directory.
Those with an adventurous spirit may also find some of the other available plugins fun to play around with too.
An easy solution is to not delete your IdnoPlugins folder when upgrading, but rather update the folders that sit inside it. If you're using other custom plugins, you'll find you need to do that, too.
We switched to Convoy because most people found the social media plugins too cumbersome to set up. Our figuring was that technical users would also have the technology knowhow to grab the other plugins from GitHub.
To be completely transparent, the support burden for the social media plugins was untenable - particularly as self-hosters typically aren't customers. (Usually self-hosters will pay another company for their hosting, but we don't see any of that.) Another option we're exploring is support for self-hosted users, although that would likely run to more than Convoy's $5.
Right now, Convoy contains social media functionality, which we've heard from a lot of people is important. Due to requirements imposed on us by Google, it will be the only way self-hosted users can syndicate to Google+ Pages. But over time we'll be adding things like real-time updates and better search, which would be impossible to enable for most self-hosted users running on shared hosts.
We continue to have a commitment to open source, and all functionality in Convoy will be available via plugins, unless we're prohibited from open sourcing something (as is true with Google+). As it becomes available, you'll be able to find it all on GitHub.
Ben Werdmüller, Apr 23 2015 on werd.io