The new TTG CE3 web plug-ins for Lightroom are arguably the best thing to happen since I discovered the joys of a truly good Pinot Noir. Or chocolate chip cookies. Kind of a tossup there.

But there’s been a big break from the older, still amazing, TTG CE2 plug-ins. The new CE3 plug-ins were rebuilt from the ground up to take advantage of responsive design elements and that means there are a lot of styling changes between the two. And by styling, I mean CSS. There are CSS classes and IDs in CE3 that are not present in CE2. This is just one of the reasons that if you’re going from CE2 to CE3 you’ll need to start your site design from scratch. Not that big of a deal since your site is going to look newer and modernerer…..

Anyway, why not take this opportunity to give your site a little sprucing up, right?

Since not all of the TTG plug-ins have been transitioned to the new CE3 version, many of us will still have older, CE2 based pages on our sites. This is especially true if you’re using the TTG Cart or Theme for WordPress, neither of which will be available in CE3 versions until later this year. TTG CE3 gallery is not compatible with the CE2 Cart, so if you’re selling images from your galleries via the Cart, you’ll need to keep using the CE2 galleries for just a bit longer.

But there is a little catch. If you’ve been managing your navigation using PHPlugins, you’ll run into a problem. The new CE3 engines use additional styling to accommodate the new responsive design. As mentioned above, these stylings are not part of the CE2 engines. So when you try to apply global navigation using PHPlugins from the new Pages CE3 to CE2 based galleries, indexes, and stand alone pages, all hell will break loose. Well, not all hell, but a sort of visual hell. In other words, you’ll lose all your navigation styling.

The solution is to use two sets of phplugins files, one for your fancy new CE3 pages and one for your existing CE or CE2 pages.

I’m going to assume that if you have lots of  galleries or other pages that you won’t want to re-export all your old CE2 galleries and such just to re-target the phplugins/ folder. Am I right? So we’re just going to leave that in place. This means that when you upload your new CE3 Pages version of your website, DO NOT REPLACE THE CURRENT PHPLUGINS FOLDER!

So what to do about navigation for your CE3 Pages? Create a new folder, call it phplugins-ce3/ or whatever you want, and place your new phplugins.php file, along with your custom css folder and style sheet, in that folder.

In the CE3 Pages engine in Lightroom, go to Site Info>Enable PHPlugins and instead of your normal server path to phphlugins, replace phplugins with phplugins-ce3 (or whatever you named your folder)

See the PHPlugins documentation for how to find your server path.

So now, what you have in place is your existing /phplugins/phplugins.php file for your old CE2 based galleries and other pages, and at the same time, your nifty new CE3 Pages installation is utilizing its own phplugins.php file at /phplugins-ce3/phplugins.php.

Here’s what I did to start my site-wide upgrade to CE3.

Using my FTP program, I delete the following:

• index.php
• galleries.php
• info.php
• about.php
• contact.php
• resources/
• photos/
• thumbnails/

(I don’t use the Services page)

Be sure you don’t delete your galleries/ folder or phplugins/ folders!

Then, from my Pages CE3 export I uploaded everything except the galleries/ and phplugins/ folder.

I then uploaded the phplugins.php file I’m using for site wide navigation of the CE3 components to the phplugins-ce3/ folder.

Of course, if you don’t have a whole lot of CE2 galleries and other CE2 based pages that you need to keep, then you can do this in reverse. Put your old phplugins.php file into a new folder (call it phplugins-old/ or something) and then re-target the phplugins file in your old galleries to phplugins-old/, re-export and upload.

Yes, things will be a little inconsistent on my site for awhile. I still need to convert my galleries and AutoIndex pages over to CE3 templates, but since they are all managed by Publisher, this will be very easy. I just need to make sure that I put the correct path to the new phplugins file in each of my CE3 templates and all will be right with the world. (Depending on when you read this, I may have already made those transitions.)

And once my site has made a complete transition to CE3, I can move my CE3 phplugins.php file back to the phplugins/ folder. Or leave it as is. It really doesn’t matter.