my Zenfolio one is not working correctly after several Adobe updates in the catalogue structure.
I'm pretty sure this isn't related to the changes introduced in LR 13.3 or 13.3.1.
I've got more than 7500 photos published at Zenfolio since 2013. I last successfully published to Zenfolio with Friedl's plugin about two weeks ago using LR 13.3. Now in LR 13.3.1, I get this error consistently:
I've seen this error many times over the years. It's caused by Zenfolio's servers sending an unexpected response to the plugin. The HTTP response code 500 is usually called "Internal Server Error" and is sent by Web servers when something has seriously gone wrong on their side. The term "database" in the message refers to Zenfolio's database, not LR's catalog. I've seen lots of other such flaky behavior over the years.
Typically I wait a for a couple three days and the issue goes away. I tried contacting Zenfolio support a couple times but that always ended in tears with nothing accomplished (as typical with any technical support).
As a longtime developer of LR plugins, I know the general structure of how publishing plugins are implemented and I have long experience examining the LR catalog base internally. LR 13.3 introduced a re-engineered sync with LR cloud, but I don't think this likely affected publishing plugins. The re-engineered sync made large changes to the Sync.lrdata side database in the catalog folder, but this is only used for syncing with LR cloud, not other publishing services like Zenfolio. It's possible that LR 13.3.1 broke something in LR's plugin API called by publishing plugins, but I think that's unlikely (but not impossible) in this case.
I think Zenfolio's support for Friedl's plugin may be on its last legs. On the plugin's web page it has said this for at least a year or two:
Note: this plugin is not compatible with Zenfolio accounts on theirProSuite, PortfolioPlus, and Portfolio plans. This plugin is compatible only with “Classic Zenfolio” plans.
In other words, Zenfolio has introduced several new plans and moved their old plans to legacy ("classic") status, and the new plans don't support the plugin API. When companies do this, they invariably swear up and down they have no plans to discontinue support for the legacy ("classic") product, but they always ramp down their investment and support as fast as they can transition customers to the new products. (I think Lightroom "Classic" is the exception -- Adobe's marketers were incompetent enough to use the word "Classic" to label a product they fully intended to keep investing in indefinitely.)
I'm fully expecting to have to migrate my photos to another platform in the near future. Zenfolio also introduced a "feature" in the last year in which they migrate older folders to archival storage -- if someone tries to view them, it could take many hours or a day or more for them to retrieve the photos from the offline storage. So I regularly republish all 7500 photos to prevent this.
LR Cloud doesn't cut it for me because my (very small) audience and I rely on the use of keywords, which LR cloud sync doesn't support. Before Zenfolio, I was on Flickr, which was rapidly going downhill as Yahoo entered its death spiral as a public company. In their attempt to compete with social-media platforms, Flickr made it much harder for my audience to see the captions, dates, and keywords on my published photos, and it was even flakier than Zenfolio. I still have a lot of older photos published on Flickr, and though they continue to have regular hiccups, since being purchased by Smugmug, they seem to have stabilized and instituted more sensible product management. So I might go back to Flickr or search for another ill-supported service.