No “Link URL or Link Target” prompts within Gallery-Custom-Links

Being new it didn’t occur to me to say which theme I am using. I activated twentyseventeen because there are sections that can be scrolled through. So I was using the block editor in the first section. The gallery was created and in its edit/update mode the attributes appear in the right column. I used gallery-custom-links last year in the footer of another theme and Link URL/Link Target appeared as soon as the plugin was installed. I’m assuming that twentyseventeen isn’t problematic, but maybe its too old now.

I just tried another test with a different website I converted to WordPress and am using as a learning tool. I read in a book that creating your own framework might be simpler and useful so that’s what I’m using here in my own basic theme. I uploaded the same plugins and created a gallery the same way as with the other site. This time “Link URL and Link Target” appeared immediately as attributes of the image tested with in the gallery. What WordPress [plugins] do in the background with MySQL is a mystery to me when pages are built. Do beginners just take something not working with “a grain of salt” and give up because they’re not coders and they’d not be able to figure it out at this level anyway?

I returned to edit the gallery block I created. In Gallery Settings the “Link” attributes no longer appear. But I did find a “Transform to Meow Gallery” choice which I selected. Then the “Please click here to refresh the preview” choice did nothing except produce the error “Updating failed, the response is not a valid JSON response.” There must be some bugs.

I returned to the gallery with a question and chose “Transform to Meow.” Then I clicked “Edit HTML” and got this: [gallery ids="188"][/gallery]. Nothing is created in the gallery tag for display. So I transformed back to the WP Gallery selection and looked at Edit HTML again. There is a decent-sized paragraph of code for that. It shows that Meow’s gallery is not producing any code to be useful.

Made some progress: Selected the prompt “Please click here to refresh the preview.” Then discovered the pencil icon for editing the gallery image. It displayed the links for entering the URL. Next I chose “Update Gallery”. However, there is an error saying “Updating failed. The response is not a valid JSON response.” Also the gallery doesn’t display when I try to “Visit Site.” There must be a bug in the MySql statement which is updating the database.

Tried to edit a Meow gallery on another site and got “This layout is not handled. Check the console logs.” Searched doc for how to access console logs and stumbled across this error dialog. Your comment was “this issue is only being experienced by you it seems” but another responded “I’m seeing the same thing” and a second “I have the same problem.” I checked the default gallery I first encountered before transferring to Meow and it didn’t even have a layout like Meow does. However, there was no “JSON response” error this time. But the site still doesn’t display the gallery itself for whatever the reason (it’s interesting that the gallery is defined, but not processed by the interpreter).