I tried several different options and plugins to try and fix this I even tried resorting to using a plugin to allow SMTP to send the notifications but none of them worked.

I then read this thread over on the WordPress support forums and on page 4, thanks to teknics there is a fix that worked instantly for me. Just a simple addition to my .htaccess file was all that was needed, if you alread have a .htaccess in place please be careful not to mess up anything else in the file as it could prevent your site from working.
Just adding the following line to the end of the .htaccess file was all that was needed:

I have checked the earlier email notifications I received before it all stopped working and my return path was listed as apache@iomart.com (where iomart are my host, aka Easyspace), after adding the line above to my .htaccess file my return path is now showing as webmaster@example.com and notifications are working ok. I’ve since it to be my actual email address of my account I use for my WordPress profile to keep things tidy and all is working well.

UPDATE - Several wordpress updates later and I stopped receiving notifications again and couldn’t figure out why. In Googling the problem I came across my own bloody blog entry and after removing the line above from my .htaccess file it all works again. So if you added the line above to your .htaccess file REMOVE IT if you’ve updated your WordPress installation.

I’m not sure why this works exactly but if you can shed any light on why forcing an extra parameter suddenly gets things working please do so in a comment below.

Warning: Compilation failed: characters with values > 255 are not yet supported in classes at offset 16 in /vhost/vhost6/s/c/o/scoopz.com/blog/wp-includes/shortcodes.php on line 213

This only appeared on 1 or 2 posts the rest remained unaffected. I realised that most of the posts affected were those which had galleries inserted using WordPress Media Manager and the

tag.

After some research it appears to be a known issue with older versions of PHP. My site is hosted with Easyspace who unfortunately won’t upgrade me from PHP Version 4.3.2 unless I pay extra for a new hosting plan.

Somebody pointed out that if you try adding a test post with new images and insert a gallery, the error doesn’t appear unless you add ALT tags to the images (Image Caption).

For now I’ve simply removed the gallery from the affected posts until I either get my PHP upgraded or the next update from WordPress.

UPDATE (20th August) – I’ve updated my web hosting so I’ve now gone from PHP4.3.2 to PHP5.1.6 and inserting a [ gallery ] still causes the same error at the top of my posts. I’ve noticed there is another update out for wordpress (2.6.1) so I’ll try updating to that and see if that fixes anything.

UPDATE (20th August) - Just finished updating to 2.6.1 and the problem has now disappeared, so if you are experiencing this issue I’d highly recommend upgrading to WordPress 2.6.1

I’ve been looking for a way to integrate JAlbum into WordPress and stumbled across this plugin:jAlbum plugin for WordPressI’ll give it a try later and post back with results.

As a iWeb user I’m slowly getting to grips with wordpress on this test site.

Thanks to Rob (www.rob.co.uk) for pointing me towards WordPress as an alternative to iWeb. He’s also the man to talk to if you want some domain names registering, catching, securing, etc with his company Hey.co.uk